Your monthly email allowance

Every 1pm account comes with a monthly email allowance. It covers the invite-style emails 1pm sends on your behalf: the share links you hand to crew, the RSVP invites you send to guests, and the reminders that chase a non-response. The Emails page shows where you stand at a glance, so you are never guessing how many sends you have left before a busy week of events.

This article explains what the allowance covers, what it deliberately does not, how to read the meter, and what to do if you run it down before the month is out.

Where to find your allowance

Open Emails from the left menu. The "Email sending" card shows three things: how many emails you have sent this month, your monthly cap, and how many you have left. A progress bar fills as you send, and a line underneath tells you the exact date the count resets. The bar turns amber when you are down to your last fifth and red when you have nothing left, so a quick look tells you whether you are fine or close to the edge.

What counts toward the allowance

One email to one recipient is one unit. A batch of forty invites is forty, not one.

These are the sends that draw it down. Some you trigger by hand, some fire on their own, and some are set off by the crew member rather than by you, but they are all email 1pm sends on your behalf and they are all charged to your account:

Crew share-link emails. Sent when you hit "Email link" on a crew row. Each one carries the unique, tokenised URL a crew member uses to open their run of show. When RSVP is turned on for the event, this same email carries the RSVP callout, so it counts once whether the recipient is crew, a guest, or both.
RSVP invites. Sent from the Send invite button in a crew row's RSVP panel, when you want to ask for an RSVP without (or before) sharing the full run of show.
Bulk invites. Every recipient in a batch counts separately. See "Batched invite emails."
Document prompts and reminders. Follow-up nudges chasing an outstanding request, whether you send one from the Requests page or an automation sends it. The outstanding requests reminder and the last reminder before the event are switched on from the start, so expect these sends without setting anything up. Convenient, but they are real sends, so they count the same as the first invite.
Upload rejection notices. The email telling a crew member their file was rejected and why.
Crew status update emails. Sent when you move a crew member's status and leave the send box ticked.
Automation emails. Everything your automations send: to clients, to crew, to an event's organizer contact, to a Space contact and to an address you nominate. Only an automation email to your own account address is free. These fire unattended, which is exactly why they are worth watching on the meter.
Emails your public forms send, on the free trial. Lead form acknowledgements, Auto Replies, confirmations for appointments booked on your booking page, and self-registration confirmations from your event's join link. On a paid plan these have a limit of their own and do not touch your allowance. See "Emails your public forms send" below.
Requests-complete confirmations. The receipt sent when a crew member finishes everything you asked for. Also crew-triggered and also charged to you.
Notifications sent outside your account, on the free trial. A notification to your own address or a team member's is free. One sent to any other address (a lead form's notify address, a weekly summary recipient) counts toward a trial's allowance. If the allowance is used up, or the notification contains a link to another website, 1pm sends it to your account's own email address instead, so you still hear about every lead.

The emails you send to clients count as well, on every plan: lead replies, quotes, confirmations and invoices. Once an account has sent its allowance to clients and crew in a month, the next one is not sent, and it shows as blocked on the Emails page with the reason.

What does not count

Two things are free and never touch your allowance:

RSVPs collected through your share link. When a guest opens your public link and responds, that round trip costs you nothing. You can collect as many RSVPs as you like through the link without spending a single email from your allowance. If your workflow is mostly "share one link, let people respond," you will barely dent the meter.
System emails. Password resets, email verification, support replies, and account notifications are housekeeping messages 1pm sends to keep your account working. They are not metered. For the full list of what 1pm sends and why, see "The emails 1pm sends."

The numbers

The cap depends on your plan:

Free trial, no card added: 20 emails per month, and no more than 3 in any one hour.
Free trial, card added: 200 emails per month, with no hourly limit.
Paid subscription: 1,000 emails per month. In an account's first 14 days, a paid account can send 50 emails to clients and crew in any 24 hours. Send us a help ticket if you need that lifted sooner.

Twenty is enough to try a share link, a lead reply and a quote on a real job. If you send a fourth email inside an hour with no card added, it isn't sent and the message says so: send it again an hour later, or add a card to send it straight away. An email that wasn't sent doesn't use up any of your 20. To get the full 200, add a card under Manage billing & payment on the Account page. Your card isn't charged until your trial ends, and the higher allowance applies within a couple of minutes.

Both reset on the first of the month, and the meter prints the exact date so you never have to work it out. Unused allowance does not roll over: a fresh cap each month, not a running balance.

The count is per account rather than per person, so a colleague you have shared your account with is spending the same pool.

There is also a daily ceiling

Separately from the monthly allowance, an account can send 300 emails in any 24 hours, whatever the plan and whatever kind of email. It is a brake on one runaway afternoon rather than a rationing device, and normal use never reaches it.

It is worth knowing about because it fails differently: you can be stopped with plenty of monthly allowance left, and the message will say the daily cap rather than the monthly one. If you hit it, the answer is simply to finish the rest tomorrow, or contact us if you need to send more.

Notifications and test emails to your own address or a team member's stay free, and they have a ceiling of their own: 200 in any 24 hours. Past that, the next one is not sent and shows as blocked on the Emails page. Nothing else is affected: new leads and replies are still in your Leads inbox, and your emails to clients and crew still go.

Emails your public forms send

Some emails are set off by a visitor, not by you: the "we got it" acknowledgement from a lead form, an Auto Reply, the confirmation for an appointment booked or changed on your booking page, and the confirmation sent to someone who registers through your event's join link.

On a paid plan these do not count toward your monthly allowance or your daily ceiling. They have a separate limit of 50 of each kind in any 24 hours, so a run of form submissions, real or not, can never stop you sending your own quotes, invoices and replies, and a flood of lead form submissions cannot stop a booking confirmation. If the 50 is reached, the next automatic email of that kind is not sent and shows as blocked on the Emails page with the reason. The lead, booking or registration itself is still saved, and you are still notified. Contact us if your forms are busy enough to need a higher limit.

On the free trial these count toward your monthly allowance like any other email. In a paid account's first 14 days they count toward its 50 emails in 24 hours.

On every plan, a lead form sends one acknowledgement to an address in 24 hours. If the same address submits again that day, the new submission arrives in your leads as usual and no second acknowledgement goes out.

What happens when you reach the cap

Send the last email in your allowance and the meter turns red. From that point, invite-style sends are paused until the next reset. Nothing else about your account changes: your events, run of show, share links, and the RSVPs already coming in through your link all keep working. It is only the act of sending a new invite, RSVP request, or reminder that waits.

If a batch of invites reaches a limit partway through, the rest of the batch isn't sent, and each person left shows the reason on the Emails page.

The block is deliberately narrow. It stops the email, not the action behind it. Reject an upload with an empty allowance and the rejection still applies, the crew member simply does not get told by email; the notice on screen says so. The same is true of a crew status change, which stands whether or not its email went.

An email stopped by the allowance is never handed to the email provider. It shows as blocked on the Emails page with the reason, so you can find it again later and send it once you have room. See "Checking what emails went out" for what the log records.

Your options depend on your plan:

On the trial with no card: adding a card raises your cap from 20 to 200 a month within a couple of minutes, with nothing charged until the trial ends.
On the trial with a card: starting your paid plan lifts your cap from 200 to 1,000 a month and clears the block as soon as the first payment goes through. The card on its own doesn't go past 200: the trial carries on until its end date. To start paying now, add a card under Manage billing & payment on the Account page, then click Start your paid plan now. Your trial ends that day and your card is charged for the first period.
On a paid plan: if 1,000 a month is genuinely not enough for your volume, the meter links you to our contact form to ask about a higher-volume plan. Otherwise the allowance refreshes on your reset date.

Making your allowance go further

A few habits keep the meter comfortable:

Lean on the share link. One link, shared once, collects unlimited RSVPs for free. Reserve individual emails for crew who genuinely need their own tokenised link.
Send reminders deliberately. A reminder is a real send. One well-timed nudge to the people who have not responded beats blanket reminders to a whole list. If the automatic request chases send more than you need, trim them under Automations: delete the second email, or switch the reminder off.
Fix bad addresses before resending. A bounced send still counts. Correct a mistyped address once rather than resending into the same typo. See "Tracking guest & crew emails" for how to spot and fix a bounce.

Why there is a cap at all

Sending email costs real money per message, and a generous-but-bounded allowance is what lets 1pm include sending in the subscription instead of billing it as a metered extra. The cap also protects your sender reputation: a sudden blast to a large unfamiliar list is exactly what trips spam filters, so a sensible monthly ceiling keeps your deliverability healthy. If you find the limit pinching a real, legitimate workload, that is a conversation worth having: get in touch via our contact form and we will sort out a plan that fits.

For the safety buffer that holds your bulk invites before they send, see "Batched invite emails."