Reference
Usage limits
Two separate limits apply to assistant usage: a longer-term allowance and a shorter burst window. Knowing which one you hit tells you how long to wait.
Two limits, not one
- Your allowance
- The total you get over a longer period. This is the headline number attached to your plan, and it is what you are really buying.
- The burst window
- A smaller cap over a much shorter rolling period. It exists so one very heavy session cannot consume a whole allowance in an afternoon.
Hitting the window is common and recovers quickly — usually within hours. Hitting the allowance means waiting for the longer reset, or moving up a plan. When you are blocked, the message tells you which one it was and when it comes back.
Current allowances by plan are on the pricing page. They change, and a copy here would go stale.
What actually uses it up
Usage is driven by how much work a request takes, not by how many messages you send. Roughly, from cheapest to most expensive:
| Kind of request | Relative cost |
|---|---|
| A short question with no tool use | Very low |
| Reading a sequence and reporting on it | Low |
| An analysis — cut sites, a digest, primer design | Low, plus a small amount for each external lookup |
| Planning a construct with literature searching | Moderate to high — many steps and much reading |
| Building and verifying a construct | High — the most expensive ordinary operation |
| A GeneLoop | Highest. It runs several phases without checking in. |
You can see where yours has gone in Settings → Usage.
Getting more out of the same allowance
- Put standing constraints in GENELOOP.md
- A plan built on wrong assumptions gets redone, and redoing it costs the same again. Project instructions.
- Start a new thread when the topic changes
- A very long conversation carries all of its history into every new message. Threads are grouped by project, so nothing is lost by starting a fresh one.
- Use the bench tools directly for direct questions
- “Does EcoRI cut this?” is free from Enzyme Search and costs usage through the assistant.
- Plan before you build
- Catching a wrong assumption in a plan is much cheaper than catching it in a finished construct.
When you are blocked
You get a clear message rather than a failure: which limit you reached, what remains, when it resets, and what a higher plan would give you. Nothing in progress is lost, and your projects stay open and readable.
Why there is a burst window at all
Because the alternative is worse. Without it, a single runaway session can consume a month's allowance in an afternoon, and the first you would know is finding yourself locked out with three weeks to go. A window that recovers in hours fails much more gently than an allowance that recovers in weeks.