Every plan includes a number of Auto DM contacts a month, and it renews every month. At the limit, Auto DM stops writing to new people until the next month, and anyone already in a conversation keeps getting replies. An extra contact is never billed: if you need more room, you add a contact pack or move up a plan.
The billing model this category inherited
Almost every automated messaging tool charges by contact, by subscriber, or by "active contact", which is usually the same thing under a different name. From the inside the logic is obvious: every conversation costs something, so every conversation pays. From the outside it produces an awkward effect, which is that the bill goes up in exactly the month the automation works.
What that model causes is easy to recognise. Somebody switches an automation off halfway through the month because they are about to go over the plan. Somebody picks a more obscure keyword so that fewer people trigger it. Somebody deletes old contacts from a list to drop back under the next tier. All three are work spent administering a price, and none of them has anything to do with talking to people better.
The worst case never shows up on a screen. A post that does better than usual brings more comments, and under a per contact model the good day is also the expensive day. That is where our decision starts: the price of a month is known the day you sign up, and a post that works must not turn into a surprise bill.
It is worth saying what we are not claiming, because the sentence sounds like a pricing trick. Volume is not free and not unlimited: it costs something and the plan bounds it. What changes is where the limit is placed. A per contact model moves the problem to a line on the invoice nobody expected. Ours keeps it in a number you can watch during the month, which only holds back new people and never cuts off a conversation that has already started.
Five quotas, and all of them stop at the limit
A workspace has exactly five limits, and all five stop when they are reached. None of them is billed for going over. What differs between them is what stops and when there is room again.
| Quota | What it counts | What happens at the limit |
|---|---|---|
| Members | People inside the workspace | Nobody else can be invited |
| Storage | Uploaded files | No new file lands until space is freed |
| Social accounts | Connected profiles | No further account can be connected |
| Ad accounts | Connected advertising accounts | No further account can be connected |
| Auto DM contacts | People an Auto DM workflow writes to in the month | No new people are written to until the next month |
The fifth is designed around who carries the consequence. Not being able to invite a sixth teammate is your inconvenience: you deal with it when you want to and nobody else finds out. An automation that leaves somebody halfway is the inconvenience of a stranger who was already waiting for the next message. That is why the contact limit only holds back people who have not come in yet: anyone already answered that month keeps getting replies. How each limit fits into the rest of the product is covered in the seats and quotas guide.
What the meter counts
The product's quota check takes a key and answers whether there is room left. For Auto DM contacts it reads the plan and the month's usage, and once the room runs out the answer is "no" for any new person, while the conversations already counted carry on.
It is worth knowing exactly what the meter counts, because that is what uses up the plan's room. Each different person an automation sends a first message to, once that message actually goes out, counts. Somebody who was asked whether they follow you and never answered already counts, because the message asking them went out. Somebody two different automations write to during the month counts once, because they are the same person.
And the number you watch during the month is literally the number the limit is checked against. There is no adjusted version and no parallel count kept somewhere else. It is a small decision that avoids the most expensive conversation a paid product can have, the one where you explain why the screen said one thing and the product did another.
A contact is not a send. An automation that asks whether somebody follows you, waits for the reply and then sends the link has written several messages to the same person and is still one contact, because what gets counted is the conversation opened rather than each message leaving it. It is the unit that penalises careful writing least, which was the point.
How to get more room
Every plan includes its own number of contacts a month, and saying so matters more than the flattering half: there is a ceiling on every tier. How many each one includes lives on the pricing page, which reads the live catalogue. That is why no figure is written here. If a month runs short, there are two ways out: add a contact pack or move up a plan. Neither arrives as a surprise, you choose both.
The rest of the shape does not depend on the plan. You pay per workspace and not per seat, so adding somebody to the team does not move the bill. There is no minimum term, no charge per post and no charge per contact. What you pay in a month is what you signed up for, with no lines that turn up afterwards. Where the rest of that structure came from is told in how we set our pricing.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeWhat the decision costs us
It is not free and we are not going to write it up as though it were. The first part of the cost is obvious: a limit that holds back new people means that, in the month a post takes off, somebody waits for their first message until you widen the room. We prefer that to a bill nobody saw coming, but it is a real trade off and it is yours to make, not ours.
The second part is that the limit has to respect what has already started. Stopping everybody at once would have been simpler to build, and it would have left conversations cut off halfway. That is why the meter tells apart the people already counted that month from the ones arriving new, and only the second group is kept out.
The third is that a limit is only honest if the meter is visible while it runs. It sits on the workspace subscription screen next to the current month's usage. Nobody should meet the number for the first time on the day Auto DM stops writing to new people.
What to watch instead of the contact counter
The contact count is a cost metric, not a result metric, and treating it as though it measured something good is the fastest way to make bad decisions. Three readings do say something about whether the automation is doing the job it was set up for.
- How many replied. A conversation starts when the other person answers, not when the first message goes out. The gap between those two numbers is what tells you whether the message is well written.
- What the follow gate did. It is not a platform lookup: the automation asks and reads the answer. How many people answer that question says a lot about whether you are asking it too early.
- What happened after the link. The short link that goes out is ours and it is measured, so the journey does not disappear inside a private message.
The automation runs on Instagram and Facebook, with comments, Instagram story replies and direct messages as triggers. How each piece is set up is on the Auto DM page, and the comparison with the tool that defined this category and its billing model is in GoFeed versus ManyChat.