Limits and the cap

Plans#

Plan	Emails per month	Daily limit
Free	3,000	100
Starter	50,000	none
Growth	200,000	none
Scale	600,000	none

Every recipient counts as one email. A message to a person with one cc counts as two.

Plans and limits apply to each brand separately. Each brand has its own cap, daily limit and usage count.

The cap is hard#

When you reach your monthly cap, sending pauses and requests return 429 monthly_cap_reached. Nothing is sent and nothing is billed. You are never charged for going over.

The count restarts on the first of the month (UTC). Upgrading raises the cap straight away.

A request that would cross the cap is refused as a whole. If you have 10 emails left and send to 50 recipients, nothing is sent and the response tells you how many remain.

Budgets#

On top of the plan, you can set a monthly and a daily budget on any brand, below the plan's cap. When a budget is reached that brand stops sending and requests return 429 brand_budget_reached. See Brands.

Alerts#

We email the account owner:

• once a month when you pass 80% of the cap,
• once a month when you reach the cap,
• once a day when the Free plan's daily limit refuses a send,
• once a month, before an automatic pause, when a brand is close to the line (see below).

For a brand, the email says which brand it is about.

Daily limit#

The Free plan allows 100 emails a day, counted from midnight UTC. Paid plans have no daily limit.

How long emitemail keeps your log#

Each plan keeps your send log and the content of your messages for a fixed time. After that, emitemail deletes them automatically.

Plan	Send log and delivery history	Message content
Free	30 days	7 days
Starter, Growth, Scale	90 days	30 days

The send log is every email with its status and the timeline of each recipient. Message content is the HTML and text you sent. When content is removed, the email still shows in your log with its status; only the body is gone. Your suppression list, domains, API keys and billing records are not part of this and are not deleted. Export anything you need to keep for longer from your own system, for example by storing the id the API returns and the webhook events you receive.

New accounts and bursts#

While an account is new, emitemail holds it to 50 emails a day and 10 a minute until it has sent 100 emails in total. After that the normal limits apply. A single email (a password reset, a one-time code) is never delayed: the limit only slows a burst, so that if a list turns out to be full of bad addresses, the first bounces come back before more mail goes out. If you are moving real volume over and need this lifted sooner, write to us.

The Free plan also keeps a limit of 10 emails a minute. If you go over it, you get 429 rate_limited with a retry_after value.

Automatic pause#

Receiving mail servers judge every customer by the mail that leaves our servers, so emitemail pauses sending automatically when the numbers cross a line. Each brand is judged on its own, over its own last 7 days, so one brand being paused does not stop the others. A brand is paused when:

• it is new and has 5 hard bounces,
• an established brand has more than 10% hard bounces over 7 days (more than 5% once it sends 500 or more), with at least 5 bounces,
• or it has 2 or more spam complaints at a rate of 0.3% or more.

Before it gets that far, the brand's health marker moves from healthy to watch to at risk, and you get one early-warning email. The account owner gets an email saying why when a pause happens, and sending resumes once a person has looked at it, usually the same day. Typos in a handful of addresses do not trigger it. Keeping your list clean does.

Checking your usage#

The dashboard overview shows what you have used this month. If you hit a limit, the error response says which one.