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 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 pay-as-you-go from your account's prepaid balance — the same machinery as the rest of Edge. Pay-as-you-go is active automatically once you have a card on file, with an optional monthly spend cap if you want a hard ceiling. 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.
What Happens at the Cap
When a site reaches its monthly allowance (and there's no pay-as-you-go headroom 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 add a card in Billing (pay-as-you-go activates with it) or top up an empty balance.
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 pay-as-you-go is active on your account — automatic with a card on file, with or without a monthly cap. 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, with a review step before anything is spent (each answer meters at the normal rate).