Retries

The SDK retries a failed GET automatically. POST never is.

What gets retried

A GET is retried when it hits a connection error (refused, reset, timed out) or gets back 429, 500, 502, 503, or 504 — 3 attempts by default, with jittered exponential backoff (random_between(0, min(30s, 1s * 2 ** attempt)) — "full jitter", the same default AWS SDKs and Google Cloud client libraries use, chosen because it spreads retries out instead of having many clients retry in lockstep during an outage). A 429's Retry-After header overrides the formula when present — the server knows better than a guess — but is still capped at the same 30s ceiling: a misbehaving or malicious server sending an absurd value shouldn't be able to hang the client.

with LencoClient(token="...", max_retries=5) as client:
    ...

with LencoClient(token="...", max_retries=0) as client:  # disable retries
    ...

Pass your own http_client= (a pre-built httpx.Client/httpx.AsyncClient) and this retry behavior is bypassed entirely — you own retries on it yourself.

Why POST is excluded

Lenco has no idempotency keys: it can't replay the exact response of an earlier request the way Stripe does for a repeated Idempotency-Key. What it does have is reference-level dedup — resubmitting a reference gets rejected with 400 "Duplicate reference" rather than a second transfer or collection. That prevents a double-send, but it also means a connection failure on the first POST attempt can surface this error on a second attempt even though the first one succeeded. Auto-retrying POST would paper over that distinction; the SDK doesn't.

Catch LencoDuplicateReferenceError to handle it correctly instead:

from lenco import LencoDuplicateReferenceError

try:
    transfer = client.transfers.to_mobile_money(..., reference="order-1001")
except LencoDuplicateReferenceError:
    # The original request may have gone through. Find out before
    # deciding whether to send again with a new reference.
    transfer = client.transfers.get_by_reference("order-1001")

See Retrying safely for the full pattern, including a plain connection failure (no response at all).