Quota and sending limits

Overview

Every plan includes a monthly allocation of emails. This page states exactly what consumes that allocation, what does not, and the delivery quality we expect from senders on the platform.

Your current usage and your plan's limit are shown on the Billing page in the dashboard.

What counts as one email

One email is one address on one message.

A single API call that names three addresses consumes three emails from your monthly allocation, not one. This applies to every recipient field — to, cc and bcc are counted the same way.

{
  "from": "you@example.com",
  "to": ["alice@example.com", "bob@example.com"],
  "cc": ["carol@example.com"],
  "subject": "Hello"
}

The request above is one API call and three emails against your quota.

This is the same unit that Resend uses, so a migrated application consumes quota at the same rate here as it did there.

Received email counts too

Postflare can receive mail as well as send it. Inbound email counts against the same monthly allocation as outbound email, one email per message received.

What consumes an email, and what does not

The line is did we do work for this address, not was it delivered. We charge for the work we performed on your behalf, and we do not charge you for our own failures.

Two of these are worth spelling out.

A suppressed address counts. Checking every address against your suppression list before sending is part of the service — it is what stops you re-mailing an address that has already bounced or complained, and it protects your sending reputation. That check is performed whether or not the message goes out.

A cancelled email does not count. If you cancel a scheduled email before it is sent, nothing was done for those addresses and nothing is charged. A scheduled email that has not been sent yet has not consumed anything either — it is counted in the period in which it is actually sent.

Broadcasts

A broadcast sent to a segment consumes one email per address that the broadcast is actually sent to, after unsubscribed contacts and topic preferences have been applied.

• An address filtered out because the contact unsubscribed, or because they are not subscribed to the broadcast's topic, consumes nothing.
• A broadcast you cancel before it is sent consumes nothing.
• A scheduled broadcast consumes nothing until it is sent.

So the number charged to your quota is the number of addresses the broadcast was delivered to the network for — which may be smaller than the size of the segment.

When you reach your limit

• At 80% of your monthly allocation, we email your organization's owner.
• At 100%, sending is paused. New send requests are rejected with an error until your allocation resets at the start of your next billing period.
• Upgrading your plan raises the allocation immediately.

Your allocation resets at the start of each billing period. Unused emails do not carry over.

Bounce and complaint rates

Delivery quality is shared. A sender with a poor reputation affects deliverability for everyone on the platform, so we monitor it and we expect senders to stay under these rates:

These are the rates at which we will contact you. Crossing one of them does not automatically suspend your account — we look at what is happening first. But a sustained pattern above these rates, or a clear violation of the Acceptable Use Policy, can lead to your account being rate limited, suspended or terminated.

The most common causes of a high bounce rate are sending to addresses that were never confirmed, and sending to a list that has not been mailed in a long time. Postflare's suppression list handles the rest: once an address has hard bounced or complained, we stop sending to it automatically.

See also

• Acceptable Use Policy and service limits
• Cancel an email
• Send a broadcast