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A conversation that runs to hundreds of messages is rarely a customer getting help. It’s usually a bot, someone testing the agent, or someone using it as a free chatbot, and every reply counts as usage. The message limit stops that one conversation without stopping the agent. Set it in the Message limit card on Agents → your agent → Instructions. You need the Owner or Admin role.

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Set a limit

  1. Switch on Limit messages per conversation. It starts at 50, which is well past what a real support conversation needs.
  2. To change the number, type it and click Save. Any whole number from 1 to 1,000.
  3. Switch it off to remove the limit. New agents have no limit.
The limit counts the customer’s own messages in one conversation. With a limit of 50, the agent answers fifty messages and the fifty-first gets the fixed reply. Greetings, the agent’s replies and your team’s replies don’t count.

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What the customer sees

Past the limit, the agent doesn’t run. The channel replies with a fixed line instead, which says how to carry on: The fixed reply, or the handover, isn’t billed and uses no AI. Every message the customer sends is still saved, so you can read the conversation in Conversations and reply from there yourself (from Zendesk, for Zendesk Messaging).

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What it doesn’t cover

  • Phone calls have their own time limit, so the message limit doesn’t apply to them.
  • A conversation a teammate has taken over isn’t affected: the agent is already staying out of it.
  • The API doesn’t apply it, because those conversations come from your own code, which can set its own limit for its users.
The limit works alongside the other protections: the per-visitor rate limits on the chat widget, the hourly reply limits on email and WhatsApp, and your workspace’s spend cap. See plans and limits for all of them.