Sorry for late reply. Is there anyway to find what time (on my dev account) it does reset? I just ran a data pull for all our clients, and it has already given me the rate_exceeded error. But I haven't run it today.
You mentioned there about slowing down our frequency of requests, but wouldn't that be a different error to :
Type: RateExceededError.RATE_EXCEEDED
Trigger: Basic Access Daily Reporting Quota
Field Path: None
This suggests to me that I've gone over the allowed amount for Basic account - I have begun the application for Standard Access (been waiting almost 2 weeks though).
Also, in regards to counting the operations, I only perform 'report downloads' - which I can see from your link : "do not count towards the daily operations quota....however, there is still a 1,000 downloads-per-day limit."