Quota & Overage
SMS and voice paging in Incident Management draw on the same monthly quota as your customer-facing SMS alerts. Here's exactly what happens when it runs out.
Incident Management doesn't have a separate telco quota. SMS and voice calls sent by IM (acknowledgment pages, escalation notifications) draw on the same monthly SMS quota your organization already has for customer-facing Monitoring alerts — one pool, one price per unit. A voice call costs exactly what an SMS costs and counts as one unit against the same allowance; see pricing for the included allowance per plan and the per-unit overage rate.
What happens at the included limit
As long as your organization is under its included monthly allowance, every SMS or voice send goes out normally — no distinction, no extra step.
Once you're at or over the included allowance, what happens next depends on a single organization-level setting: overage.
- Overage off (the default) — a paid send beyond the allowance is blocked. It is not silently dropped: the engine treats it as "no telco spend available right now" and falls back, as described below. You are never billed automatically for going over.
- Overage on (opted in from your Incident Management settings) — a send beyond the allowance goes out and is billed per unit, up to an optional monthly safety cap (a hard ceiling on overage spend) if you've set one. Once that cap would be exceeded, sends block again exactly as if overage were off.
What happens when a send is blocked
A blocked SMS/voice send never means the incident goes unpaged. Three things happen at once:
- Free channels keep going. Push and email notifications for that same rule chain are unaffected and continue to fire — quota only ever gates the paid (SMS/voice) channels.
- Escalation skips ahead immediately. Rather than waiting out the blocked tier's delay, the engine promotes the next escalation tier right away — the point of escalating is to reach someone, and a paid channel that can't send is a reason to try the next tier sooner, not later.
- One admin alert per organization per month. The first time a send is blocked in a given calendar month, your organization's admins get an email explaining that the quota is exhausted, which incident triggered it, and how to fix it (enable overage, or raise the safety cap). This is deliberately throttled to one email per month — a single severe incident can otherwise exhaust quota (and would otherwise trigger this alert) many times in a few minutes.
None of this requires any action from you to keep incidents visible: the worst case is that paging is slower (next tier instead of a retried SMS) and quieter (no SMS/voice at all until the next billing period, unless you opt in to overage) — never invisible.
Where to change it
The overage opt-in (overageEnabled) is configured per organization from your Incident Management settings (Dashboard → Incidents → Settings) or via PATCH /api/im/org-settings. The optional monthly safety cap and per-unit overage price are part of your organization's existing SMS billing settings (Dashboard → Billing) — the same cap that already applies to overage on customer-facing Monitoring SMS alerts, since both draw from the one pool.