---
title: "Assist Limits & Billing"
description: "Edge Assist's free allowance, per-question pricing, usage budgets, and every operational limit in one place."
url: https://edge.network/docs/assist/limits-and-billing/
---

# Assist Limits & Billing

Assist

# Limits & Billing

One billable unit: the answered question. Search is free and unlimited, forever. Every
site answers 250 questions free each month; beyond that it's $0.01 per question.

## How Billing Works

- **A question = one AI-composed answer.** Follow-ups each count as one question. Searches, config fetches, and handoffs are free. [Cached answers](https://edge.network/docs/assist/caching) still count — metering is per question asked.
- **250 free per site per month.** No credit card required; the allowance resets on the first of the month.
- **Beyond that: $0.01 per question** ($10 per 1,000), billed against your account's prepaid balance under your usage budget — the same pay-as-you-go machinery as the rest of Edge. No plans, no seats, no per-page fees.
- **Extended conversations meter at 2×** on their deep turns — longer threads carry more context, which costs more to produce. It's an optional per-site setting.

Worked examples are on the [pricing page](https://edge.network/assist/pricing).

## What Happens at the Cap

When a site reaches its monthly allowance (and there's no usage budget to continue
against), the widget degrades gracefully rather than breaking:

- Instant search keeps working — it's free and unlimited.
- Ask is paused: the widget shows a capacity notice and stops offering AI answers; the API returns `429 { "error": "monthly-limit" }`.
- Answering resumes automatically when the month rolls over, or immediately when you set a usage budget in [Billing](https://edge.network/account/billing).

Your site's Overview page in Control shows this month's usage against the cap, with
the same warning thresholds your bill sees.

## All Limits

| Limit | Value |
| Answered questions (free) | 250 / month / site |
| Question length | 500 characters |
| Questions per conversation | 20 (100 with extended conversations) |
| History window per ask | 6 turns (12 with extended conversations) |
| Pages per site | 500 free · 10,000 paid |
| Chunks per site | 50,000 |
| Search rate limit | 60 / minute / visitor |
| Ask rate limit | 10 / 5 minutes / visitor |
| Handoff rate limit | 3 / hour / visitor |

## Paid Features

A site becomes "paid" the moment your account has a usage budget. That unlocks, at no
extra flat fee:

- **Higher ingestion ceiling** — 10,000 pages instead of 500.
- **White label** — name the assistant after your product and remove the "Powered by Edge Assist" badge.
- **Extended conversations** — longer threads with a deeper memory (metered 2× on deep turns).
- **Cache pre-warming** — answer likely questions ahead of time (rolling out; each answer meters at the normal rate).

## Next Steps

[Pricing — worked examples for real sites](https://edge.network/assist/pricing) [Getting Started — live in under ten minutes](https://edge.network/docs/assist/getting-started)
[Back to Docs](https://edge.network/docs) [Need help?](https://edge.network/support)