How your email allowance works

What counts against your 1,000 included emails, how auto-buy adds more, and what happens when you run out.

Overview

Your Base subscription includes 1,000 emails per billing period. A billing period is one month, starting on the day you subscribed. When the included emails run out, Transactional Email can add more for you automatically — 100 emails at a time, within a monthly budget you set. Extra emails are billed on your next monthly invoice. When there’s nothing left to send with, new sends fail with quota_exhausted until the next period starts.

What counts

Only emails handed over for delivery count.

Live sends that go out. An email sets aside one email of your allowance once it has cleared the template, suppression, contact, content review, and per-recipient checks, and keeps it once it’s sent.
Queued warm-up sends. An email held as queued_warmup keeps its place in your allowance, so it can’t be refused the next day for lack of allowance.

These don’t count:

Sandbox sends. They use the separate sandbox allowance of 20.
Sends that fail — whether they’re stopped early (suppressed, contact_not_found, review_failed, recipient_rate_limited) or fail later, at the last step (an internal error, say). A send that had set aside an email gives it back, and so does a warm-up send that can’t go out the next day.

Auto-buy

When your included emails run out, auto-buy adds a top-up of 100 more emails straight away, so your workflows keep sending. It repeats each time the allowance runs out, as many times as your monthly auto-buy budget allows in one billing period. Auto-buy only buys whole top-ups, so it never spends more than your budget.

Nothing is charged when a top-up is added. Each top-up appears on your next monthly invoice, when your subscription renews, and is paid with it. The price of a top-up is shown in Settings → Billing.

To set your budget, you need to be a Super Admin in HubSpot.

Open Settings → Billing. In HubSpot, go to Marketplace apps → Transactional Email and open Settings.
Enter an amount under Monthly auto-buy budget ($). Enter 0 to turn auto-buy off, or a whole-dollar amount from $10 to $1,000. Under the field, Settings shows how many extra emails your budget buys each month and the most it can spend. If your budget doesn’t divide evenly into top-ups, it adds “(we only buy whole blocks of 100)”.
Click Save budget.

The new budget applies right away, including to the current billing period.

Example: with a budget that covers three top-ups, you can send up to 1,300 emails in a period: 1,000 included plus three top-ups of 100. The 1,301st send fails with quota_exhausted, and you’re billed for the three top-ups on your next invoice.

When you run out

When your budget is used up, or auto-buy is off:

New sends fail with quota_exhausted until your allowance resets at the start of the next billing period. In the send log, the detail reads: “This billing period’s emails are used up, and auto-buy is off or has reached your monthly budget. Raise the budget in Settings → Billing to keep sending.”
Your alert recipients get one email per billing period, “Sending stopped: this period’s emails are used up”, with a button to raise your budget (or to turn auto-buy on).

To keep sending before the period ends, raise your budget (or set one, if auto-buy is off). Auto-buy adds a top-up on the next send.

Sends that failed with quota_exhausted aren’t retried. Re-enroll the records once you have allowance again.

Things to know

Nothing rolls over. Unused included emails and unused top-up emails expire at the end of each billing period.
Extra emails are billed with your subscription. Top-ups bought during a period appear as lines on the invoice for your next monthly renewal. If your subscription ends, any top-ups not yet billed are invoiced and charged right away. See Managing billing and invoices.
Alerts at 80% and 100%. Your alert recipients get an email when you’ve used 80% and 100% of your included emails — each at most once per billing period — showing whether auto-buy is on and your monthly budget. Usage is checked every hour, and if you pass both marks within the hour you get only the 100% email.
An old auto-buy cap doesn’t carry over. If you set an auto-buy cap before monthly budgets replaced it, auto-buy is off until a Super Admin sets a budget, so you’re never billed under the new pricing without choosing to.
Your budget also sets the volume baseline for auto-pause. A sudden spike is only treated as unusual if it’s more than 10% of your included emails plus the extra emails your budget can buy. See Sending limits and auto-pause.

Where to see your usage

App Home’s Usage section shows Emails this period — used out of your current allowance — with Included, Extra emails bought (and what they’ll add to your next invoice), your Auto-buy budget, and when the period ends.