Conversation Usage & Overage Limits

This document provides a guide for customers who handle  billing from within the Talkative billing platform. 

If you are an enterprise customer, some of this information will be relevant, however, your payments, invoices and specific limits will be handled by your dedicated customer success manager or channel partner. For support relating to your billing, including limits and upgrades please contact your CSM who will be happy to assist you.

You can locate your billing overview by navigating to /billing whilst logged in as an account holder or searching for billing.

When logged in, you will be presented with a billing page such as this:

Resource Limits

This page will detail your resource limits. All usage limits reset on the first of the month even if you first subscribed to a plan in the middle of the month. Once a limit has been reached, you will not be able to consume any more of that resource except for interaction channels, if overage has been configured for them.

Total Conversations

Each subscription is based on a number of total conversations. These are interactions within the Talkative platform. E.g. a chatbot interaction that hands off to a human agent is 1 (one) single conversation. Likewise, an SMS conversation with 15 back-and-forth messages is one single conversation.

Channel Limits

Each subscription plan has a set number of available conversations. Despite the usage being shown per channel, the usage restrictions on our standard licenses are not channel specific, so you can have as many interactions as you wish up to this limit in whatever channel you require.

We report on individual channel usage to allow you to monitor which channels are utilising your available usage and to allow you to set channel specific overage limits. This means that if you are close to your limit, you could prevent new web interactions from starting, whilst allowing customers to continue creating SMS and WhatsApp interactions whilst paying per interaction in overage charges.

Interaction Channel Overage

Each subscription has a set limit to the number of interactions you can handle. If you find yourself coming close to your limit, you can set an overage allowance which you can consume. This overage limit is priced per interaction based on your subscription plan and is billed at the end of each month.

An account holder can adjust the overage limits by clicking the “Manage Overage Limits” button.

By default, overage is not enabled as overage will result in a bill in addition to your usual monthly or annual subscription. To enable overage, click the allow overage toggle. Toggling this option alone will not allow interactions to exceed their stated limits, you must increase the interaction limits per channel for the month. So for example, setting the Web Limit to 100 and increasing your global limit to 200 will allow you to take up 100 additional web chats per month and you will be billed for each of these above your normal subscription allowance.

What is the global limit?

The global limit is a safeguarding measure introduced to provide an upper limit which all channels abide by. So when might you need this? Well, let’s say you are on the starter plan, and you have a maximum of 100 interactions available to you for the entire month. You use both web chats and SMS chats to converse with your customers.