Why we publish thresholds
Plenty of products advertise “unlimited” and quietly throttle, deprioritise, or disconnect heavy users with no warning. We don’t. We think customers deserve to know, before they sign up, what counts as typical usage and what we’ll do if their usage runs well beyond it.
This page is also our compliance position: under the Australian Consumer Law (s.18 — misleading or deceptive conduct), “unlimited” needs honest disclosure of any practical limits. The numbers below are our honest disclosure. They are the same numbers our customer-success team uses internally.
Typical usage thresholds
Two thresholds per agent: a soft alert (we send you a friendly nudge so nothing surprises you at month-end) and a hard threshold (our customer-success team gets in touch). Both are based on the kind of usage we see across hundreds of small Australian businesses; if you’re below them, you’re in normal territory.
| Agent | Soft alert | Hard threshold |
|---|---|---|
|
Simon
Website chat
|
3,000
chats / month
|
5,000
chats / month
|
|
Hugo
Internal HR / IT
|
6,000
staff queries / month
|
10,000
staff queries / month
|
|
Maeve
Voice phone
|
No fair-use cap
Maeve runs on a pre-purchased minute pool included with your plan, with transparent per-minute overage pricing. There is no fair-use threshold — you simply pay for what you use beyond the included pool. See the pricing page for the included minutes and overage rate that apply to your tier. |
|
Counts are measured on a calendar-month cycle aligned to your billing date. A “chat” with Simon is a single visitor conversation; a “query” with Hugo is a single Slack/Teams message that triggers a response.
What happens at each threshold
A friendly nudge — nothing changes
You’ll get an email letting you know your usage is approaching the upper end of typical. Your service keeps running exactly as before. The alert exists so you’re not surprised if you’re tracking towards the hard threshold — not to push you to upgrade.
Our team reaches out — service stays on
Someone from our customer-success team gets in touch within one business day. We’ll talk through what your usage looks like, whether a Squad or Enterprise plan would be a better fit, and any pricing options that make sense. Your agents keep answering throughout.
We do not silently disconnect, throttle, or degrade your agents when you cross it. The hard threshold simply triggers a human conversation. If you choose not to upgrade, we’ll work with you on a path that keeps your service running — we won’t pull the plug without a chat first.
What counts as excessive use
The hard threshold isn’t a moral judgement — if you’re a busy retailer with high web traffic and you legitimately have 6,000 buyer chats a month with Simon, you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve just outgrown a Solo plan. The Squad and Enterprise tiers exist for that.
That said, fair-use cover does not extend to:
- Automated scripts, load-testing tools, or bots driving conversations that aren’t real visitors or staff.
- Re-selling agent capacity to third parties under your account.
- Deliberate abuse designed to drain capacity (for example, looped prompts or attempts to extract training data).
For these cases we may suspend the offending traffic source after notice. We’ll always tell you what we’re seeing before taking action.
Overage versus fair-use
On Simon and Hugo plans, fair-use is what governs the “unlimited” framing. There is also a separate overage rate — a per-chat or per-query price that only applies if your usage genuinely exceeds the hard threshold and you and our team have agreed that overage billing (rather than a plan upgrade) is the right path. You will never be billed overage without explicit prior agreement.
Maeve is different: because voice minutes have a real per-minute cost we can’t absorb, Maeve is metered transparently from minute one. Her overage rate is published on the pricing page and applies automatically once you’ve used your included minutes.
Changes to this policy
If we ever change the thresholds, we’ll email every existing customer at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and your existing thresholds will be honoured to the end of your current annual term. We won’t silently lower a threshold underneath an active customer.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you’d like to talk through what your projected usage looks like before signing up, get in touch — we’d rather have the conversation upfront than after a surprise.