Track your usage and how long messages are kept

Two different limits apply to your organization: how many messages you can receive in a month, and how long they are kept.

Your plan’s figures are on the Pricing page and in Settings → Billing. They are not copied here, so that a stale value cannot sit around in an article.

What uses your quota, and what uses nothing

Your monthly quota is counted in operations. An operation is a product event, never an API call.

What you do	What it uses
Receive an email in an inbox	1 operation
Read that message, once or forty times	Nothing
Wait for it to arrive with wait, for five minutes	Nothing
List your inboxes, search, download an attachment	Nothing
Receive a message once the quota is reached	Nothing: it is refused before being stored

The rule that places any case without consulting this table: you pay when a message arrives, or when it is duplicated. Never when you read it.

A test that receives 3 emails and reads them back 40 times therefore uses 3 operations, not 43. You can poll the API as often as you like without watching the counter. The only ceiling on your calls is technical: 600 requests per minute per API key.

The Pricing page also lists the operations whose price is already set for capabilities that are on the way, each marked “soon”.

Volume is counted per organization

Not per inbox, not per workspace. The organization is what carries the plan, the seats and the included volume.

Workspaces therefore have no effect on the counter: spreading your traffic across several workspaces moves no ceiling.

When the monthly quota is reached

The message is refused at the door, with an SMTP 5.7.x code. It is neither stored nor parsed, and you are charged nothing for it.

You see it in three places:

1. In your application’s logs, as a real SMTP failure. The message does not vanish silently.
2. In the API, on the messages concerned: status: "quota_exceeded" and an error object, with no extracted fields. See Reading from tests.
3. In the application, on the quotas screen.

To receive again: buy a pack, see Billing.

Set a quota per inbox

On top of your plan’s ceiling, set a quota per inbox and an alert threshold. A runaway test suite then burns through its inbox rather than your month.

Facteur writes to you on its own at 80 % and 100 % of your volume, and warns you when the last few days’ rate empties the period before it ends. See Get warned before reception stops.

This is available on every plan, including the free one.

How long a message is kept

Every message is deleted after the number of days that comes with your plan. The purge removes the row and the raw file, it waits for nothing from you, and it cannot be turned off.

Your test messages contain reset links, one-time codes and sometimes real addresses. Keeping them indefinitely would be a risk for you, and a promise the sub-processor register could not hold. See Data and sovereignty.

Buy volume without changing plan

Your subscription sells features, seats and retention. Volume is bought separately, in prepaid packs: increasing your capacity never changes your subscription. See Billing.

Known limits

• No usage history. The application shows the current month’s volume, with no curve over previous months.
• Online payment is not active yet, so buying packs still goes through us. See Billing.