Plans and Quotas
Your plan sets three allowances. This page explains what each one measures, where to watch it, and what happens when you reach it.
| Allowance | What it limits |
|---|---|
| Concurrent Online Users | How many people can be in your chat rooms at the same moment |
| Chat Rooms | How many chat rooms the account may have |
| Available Storage | How much space the files and images people upload can take up |
The figures themselves are on deadsimplechat.com/pricing and on Plans & Pricing in the dashboard, which shows them against the plan you are on. Your own current usage is on the dashboard home page, under Quota.
Concurrent online users
What counts as an online user
Someone who is in one of your chat rooms right now. Not someone who has ever visited, not someone who is registered, not a message they sent yesterday — someone connected to a room at this instant.
Three things follow from that, and they are the three things people get wrong:
- It is counted across the whole account, not per room. If you have two rooms with 1,000 people in one and 500 in the other, you are using 1,500 of your allowance, not 1,000. The allowance is a pool the rooms draw from.
- It is counted per person, not per connection. The same person with the room open in two tabs is one online user.
- It rises and falls by itself. Somebody joining adds to it, somebody closing the tab takes away from it. Nothing accumulates: a room that 50,000 people passed through over a day, 200 at a time, used 200 of the allowance.
Two more details:
- Only people who have actually joined count. Somebody looking at the join screen, who has not entered a name and pressed the button yet, has not joined the room and is not using any of the allowance.
- Moderators count. A moderator in a room is in the room like anybody else.
Somebody whose connection drops without closing properly can sit in the count for a while before a periodic tidy-up clears them. If the number looks higher than the room does after an event, that is usually what you are seeing, and it settles on its own.
Where to see the number
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Dashboard, the Quota panel | A Concurrent Online Users meter: how much of the allowance is in use |
| Chat Rooms | An Online Users card for the account, and a column with the figure for each room |
| Dashboard -> Moderation | The Online Users panel, listing who is in the selected room by name |
| Get Presence | onlineUsers for one room, plus who they are |
| getOnlineUsers | The same from the SDK, including onlineUsersCount |
The room-by-room figures are per room. The account-wide total — the one the allowance is measured against — is the Quota meter on the dashboard.
What happens when the limit is reached
People already in a chat room are not affected. Nobody is disconnected, nothing stops working for them, and they can keep talking. The limit applies to arrivals.
Someone who tries to join once the account is at its limit does not get in. They see a dialog:
Room Limit Reached
Room full. Please ask the admin to upgrade the plan.
Dismissing it reloads the page, so if space has freed up in the meantime they get in on the retry.
As the account owner you are emailed as the number climbs: once when usage passes half of what your plan allows, and again when the limit is reached. The early warning is sent on paid plans. Both are spaced out rather than sent for every blocked arrival, so one message can stand for a lot of turned-away people. Treat the first one as the signal to act, because by the time the second arrives people are already being turned away.
Handling it in your own code
The chat sends the SDK a roomLimitReached event at the moment someone is turned away, so your page can react rather than leaving them with the dialog:
frame1.on("room_limit_reached", (message) => {
console.log("room_limit_reached", message);
// show your own message, offer a replay, queue the person, page an admin
});
{
"error": "room_limit_reached",
"message": "Room limit is reached, please upgrade the plan to allow more users."
}
This is worth wiring up for anything scheduled — a launch, a match, a broadcast — where a wave of arrivals is expected and being quietly bounced is the worst outcome.
Larger plans
Yes, there are plans above the ones listed. The sizes shown on Plans & Pricing are not the ceiling. Past a certain size the button on the plan changes from Purchase to Contact Us, because those are arranged with the team rather than bought from the page.
Two things worth knowing before you ask:
- One-off events are catered for. The pricing page carries a "Need a custom plan for your event? contact us." link for exactly this — a plan sized for a single broadcast, match or launch, rather than a year of capacity you will not use.
- Upgrading part-way through a cycle is pro-rated, so moving up ahead of an event does not mean paying twice. See Managing Your Plan.
Contact support with the number of people you expect to be online at once and when you need it, and they will tell you what fits. Do not size the plan from the total audience — size it from how many will be in the chat at the same moment, which is the number the allowance measures.
Chat rooms
Your plan allows a certain number of chat rooms. The Chat Rooms page shows Total Chat rooms and Available Chat rooms side by side, and the dashboard Quota panel has a Chat Rooms meter.
Creating one beyond the allowance is refused with "Chat Room limit reached. Upgrade your plan to
add more chat rooms." — the same message whether you use the Create Chat room button or
Create Chat Room over the REST API, which returns it as a
400. Nothing is part-created; you simply do not get the room.
The count is of rooms that exist, not rooms in use. An idle room, a test room and a room whose chat is turned off all take a slot. Deleting a room frees its slot immediately — the count is taken fresh each time, so there is no waiting period. See Deleting Messages and Rooms.
If an account ends up holding more rooms than its plan allows — which is what happens when a larger plan ends and is not renewed — the dashboard shows an Account Locked page: "Upgrade your plan or delete chat rooms to unlock." It lists every room with its Room ID and the date it was created, and gives you Delete, Export Messages and Export Files on each row, so you can take what you need off a room before removing it. Delete enough rooms, or move back up to a larger plan, and the dashboard opens again.
The chat rooms themselves keep running while the dashboard is locked. People in them can carry on chatting; it is your management view that is held, not their chat.
Storage
Available Storage on Settings -> Account shows how much of your plan's file storage is in use. It measures the files and images uploaded into your chat rooms.
Two separate limits apply to uploads, and both are set by your plan:
- How much you may store in total. Once that is used up, uploads into any of your chat rooms fail. The person trying to share something sees the upload fail rather than an explanation, so if participants report that sharing has stopped working, check this figure first. An integration calling the upload endpoint directly gets the reason back: "Chat Storage full, ask the admin to upgrade."
- How large a single file may be. An upload over that size is refused on its own, whatever room it was headed for and however much storage is free. Above all plans there is a fixed ceiling of 100 MB for any single upload.
Separately from the allowances, executable and script file types are refused whatever plan you are on, and a room only accepts uploads at all if File and Image Sharing is switched on for it — see the Chat Room Settings Reference.
Three things bring the figure back down:
- Files age out. An uploaded file or image is removed 30 days after it was uploaded — the note beside Available Storage says so — and the space comes back with it.
- Deleting frees space at once. Deleting a message removes its attachment; Delete all messages removes every file in that room; deleting a room removes all of them. See Deleting Messages and Rooms.
- Exporting does not. Taking a copy of the files does not remove them from the account. See Exporting Messages and Files.
Because files age out on their own, export anything you need to keep before it does. Storage is not an archive.
Message history is not part of the Available Storage figure. What a plan includes for chat history is listed with the plan on pricing.
Features that depend on the plan
Some things are not a quota but a feature the plan does or does not include. Where that is the case, the control is still visible in the dashboard but covered by a prompt to upgrade rather than being hidden, so you can always see what exists. The affected settings say so on their own pages — Chat Room Settings Reference, Polls and Webhooks.
Parts of the REST API work the same way. A call that your plan does not cover comes back 400 with
"This endpoint is not allowed in your current plan, please upgrade your plan to access this api",
and the equivalent dashboard action usually still works.
If you are not sure whether something is included, pricing lists it per plan and support will confirm it for your account.
Related
- Managing Your Plan — changing plan, cancelling, storage on Settings -> Account.
- Billing FAQ — receipts and paying.
- roomLimitReached — the SDK event fired when someone is turned away.
- Get Presence — online users for a room, over the REST API.
- Deleting Messages and Rooms — how to free a room slot or storage.