Public NHTSA vPIC endpoints do not give you a private SLA. When your free VIN tool, a marketplace embed, and a cron job all refresh at once, naive retries make outages worse. Every client wakes up, fails, sleeps the same 500ms, and hits DecodeVinValues together again. This post covers a small TypeScript retry helper with exponential backoff and jitter, plus product rules so retries do not lie to users or stampede the upstream API. What is worth retrying Retry transient fai...