Usage limits — overage hard cap, budget stop

The Usage limits page is where you set the policy levers that govern what happens when usage runs hot. Two controls:

  1. Budget stop — what to do when message usage hits the cap.
  2. Overage hard cap — the most you'll ever pay above your cap in a single billing period.

(Conversation retention used to live here; it's now under Account → Data privacy.)

You're looking at this page when something on usage made you nervous and you want to tighten the rails.

Overage hard cap

The hard cap is the absolute ceiling on overage charges. Set it once and forget it: even if traffic doubles next week, we won't bill more than the cap. When usage hits the cap mid-period, the widget stops serving new conversations until the period rolls over.

Set the cap in your billing currency. Acceptable range is €0 to €10,000 per period. €0 means no overage charges at all — i.e. behave like budget-stop is on at the message cap.

The per-message overage rate is shown next to the field so you can do the math. Cap ÷ rate = roughly how many extra messages you're willing to pay for before we cut.

Budget stop

Tri-state lever:

  • Always stop at the cap — no overage messages at all, even if you have a hard cap set. Use this if you want predictable monthly costs and zero risk of surprise charges. Behaves like hard cap = €0.
  • Keep serving with overage (the default for paid accounts) — past the cap, bill per message until the hard cap or period-end.
  • Use default — defer to the workspace default. On trials this defaults to "stop"; on paid workspaces it defaults to "keep serving".

This is the most commonly-misread setting on the page — flip it on during a trial and you'll wonder why the bot stopped answering at the end of the month.

Common questions

  • What is overage? Messages beyond your cap, billed at the per-message overage rate up to your hard cap.
  • What's the hard cap? Your maximum overage charge per period. Even if traffic spikes 10x, you won't pay more than this.
  • How do I stop overage charges entirely? Set the budget-stop to Always stop at the cap. Or set the hard cap to €0.
  • What happens when I hit the hard cap? The widget stops serving new conversations until the next billing period. Existing conversations finish gracefully.
  • Where did retention go? It moved to Account → Data privacy — that's a privacy concern, not a usage policy one.
  • I'm on a trial — does overage apply? No. Trials don't bill, so there's nothing to cap. The budget-stop lever still affects whether the widget keeps serving past the eval cap.

See also usage and quotas for the live view of where you are this period, billing for invoices and cancellation, and account privacy for retention, exports, and per-visitor GDPR.

Where to find us

Stuck? Email [email protected].