Plaid accounts/balance/get hits the institution live and is rate limited far more tightly

The plain accounts endpoint returns cached account data including balances as of Plaid's last update and is cheap to call. The balance endpoint bypasses that cache and queries the institution in real time, which makes it slower, far more likely to surface institution errors such as an institution being down, and subject to a much lower per-Item rate limit.

Calling it on every dashboard page load hits that limit and returns a rate-limit error for a user whose data was fine moments earlier. Confirm by looping the balance endpoint against a single sandbox Item. Use the cached endpoint for display, call the live one only immediately before an action that depends on funds being present such as initiating a transfer, and show an as-of timestamp instead of implying cached balances are live.