When using Chatfuel, your plan includes unlimited active contacts. Fair use AI limits apply to ensure stable performance for all users. Understanding how these limits work helps you get the most out of your plan and avoid interruptions in service.
What are fair use AI limits?
Your plan covers unlimited active contacts and unlimited messages, but the AI processing behind each reply has a fair use allowance per billing period.
AI processing happens whenever your assistant generates a reply, classifies an incoming message, or runs an AI-powered automation. Static actions don't count — keyword replies, button flows, broadcasts, and any non-AI automation are unlimited regardless of volume.
Our plan is designed to fit 98% of businesses. Most accounts never come close to the limit.
What affects your AI usage?
Every time your AI assistant replies, it reads through three things to generate a relevant response:
- Your knowledge base — company information, services, products, FAQs
- Your additional instructions — how the AI should behave, what tone to use, your specific workflows
- The conversation history — the back-and-forth with the specific client it's replying to
Together, these form your agent's context window — the total amount of information your AI processes for each reply.
The larger any of these are, the more processing each reply requires. A knowledge base with 50,000 characters takes more to read than one with 5,000. Detailed multi-step workflow instructions take more than a simple behavioral rule. A 30-message conversation takes more than a 3-message one.
This is why two businesses on the same plan can use very different amounts of their fair use allowance — it depends on how much information your AI is working with, not just how many clients write to you.
What happens if I reach the limit?
If your usage exceeds your fair use limit for the billing period, your bot pauses. Your AI assistant stops replying to incoming messages until the limit resets.
You have three options:
- 1Renew your plan. Click "Renew now" in your billing settings. Your usage resets immediately and your bot resumes working right away. The new billing period starts on the day of the renewal.
- 2Wait for the next billing period. Your limits renew automatically on your renewal date, and your bot resumes when they do.
- 3Use your own OpenAI key. Contact our support team and share your OpenAI API key. We'll connect it to your account so you're billed directly by OpenAI for AI processing. Fair use AI limits don't apply when you use your own key.
If you believe you've hit the limit incorrectly, contact our support team and share the details — we'll review your case.
Tips to optimize your usage
Most businesses don't need to optimize — fair use limits are sized for typical usage. But if you serve high message volumes or have a very detailed setup, these adjustments help reduce how much fair use you consume per reply:
- Keep your additional instructions focused. Use them for behavioral rules and workflows, not for general company information — company info belongs in your knowledge base.
- Trim your knowledge base. Remove outdated services, archived promotions, and duplicate FAQs. Your AI works faster and more accurately on a clean knowledge base.
- Keep FAQs concise. Long, repetitive answers add to every reply, even when not directly relevant to the question being asked.
- Organize by relevance. Put your most-asked information first. Remove sections you no longer need.
A clean, focused setup means each reply uses less of your allowance and your AI assistant performs better at the same time.