What happens when processing pauses

“Paused” in this product means one specific thing: your Workflows stop running. It never means we stopped listening, and it never means you are being billed. This page lists the three — and only three — reasons a pause happens, what keeps working through every one of them, and how each one lifts.

What keeps working, always

Every pause, whatever its reason, leaves all of this running:

• Ingestion continues, unmetered. New comments and DMs keep being pulled in from your connected Pages and accounts. Nothing is dropped or missed, and none of it counts against anything — ingestion has no allowance.
• The Inbox stays live. Everything that arrives lands in your Inbox as usual, and the in-app banner shows a live count of what is queued for your rules.
• Manual moderation always works. Replying, hiding, and liking by hand from the Inbox keep working through a pause — and stay free. Manual actions are never billable, paused or not.

What stops is exactly one thing: Workflow automation. New comments and DMs are not evaluated by your Workflows while the pause stands.

A pause stops the free actions too

Your plan meters only outbound automations — replies, DMs and likes. Hiding, deleting and approving never count against your allowance and never bill. But a pause stops all automation, not just the billable kind, so automatic hiding stops with everything else. That is the real cost of a pause, and it is why the 90% notice is persistent. Hiding by hand still works, and still costs nothing.

A pause banner names its reason and its way back. This one is a spend-cap pause; the allowance pause reads "Automation is paused at your plan allowance" instead.

The three reasons

Pause reason	What happened	What lifts it
Allowance	You used your plan’s included automations and extra usage is off	The window resets, you upgrade, or the billing owner enables extra usage
Spend cap	Extra usage is on, and accrual reached your cap	Raise or remove the cap, upgrade, or the window resets
Payment past-due	A payment failed and you are past your allowance during the 7-day grace	Update the payment method, or the window resets — automation resumes on the fresh allowance, while extra usage stays paused until the card is fixed

1. The allowance, without opt-in

The default state of every account: when your included automations are used up and extra usage has not been enabled, automation pauses and nothing is billed — there is no automatic overage, ever. The in-app banner reads “Automation is paused at your plan allowance”. This is the one pause that also shows the blocking explainer offering the ways out (upgrade, enable extra usage, or wait for the window).

Only outbound automations get you here. A month of heavy moderation — thousands of hides, deletes and approvals — moves this meter by exactly zero, so a page under attack does not pause for defending itself. What consumes the allowance is the product replying, messaging and liking on your behalf. See How automation billing works.

2. The spend cap

Only possible with extra usage on and a cap set: when accrual reaches 100% of your cap, automation pauses. You were alerted at 80%. A cap pause is resolved at the cap — raise it, remove it, or upgrade; it does not offer “enable extra usage” to someone who already has. Note that lowering a cap below what has already accrued triggers this pause immediately at save, and the app asks you to confirm first. With no cap set, this pause cannot happen.

Screenshot — pending capture The Billing and Usage tab during a spend-cap pause: a banner reading Automation paused, you reached your cap, with the automations meter past the cap and the ways back — raise or remove the cap, upgrade, or the window reset

A cap pause names its number: the banner says which cap was reached, the meter shows the accrual that reached it, and the ways back are listed in the same breath. Recapture queued: the existing image states the old metered unit and the old per-automation rate.

3. Payment past-due

A failed payment starts a 7-day grace window, and by itself it interrupts nothing: within your included allowance, everything — automation included — keeps running normally while you fix the payment method.

During the grace, though, extra usage behaves as not-enabled. So if you go past your allowance during those 7 days, automation pauses with the past-due reason even if you had opted in — and nothing new accrues while the card is broken. The extra-usage card says it plainly: “Extra usage is paused until your payment method is updated. Your plan’s included allowance keeps working normally, and nothing new is accruing.” Updating the payment method restores everything. A window reset lifts this pause too: the fresh allowance is not used up, so automation resumes even while the card is still broken — but extra usage stays paused until the payment method is updated.

Resuming: the 24-hour catch-up

When a pause lifts — the window resets, you upgrade, the cap is raised, the card is fixed, or extra usage is enabled — automation resumes and catches up the last 24 hours of queued comments and DMs. Anything older than 24 hours at resume time stays in your Inbox for manual moderation but is not run through Workflows retroactively.

A pause is never a penalty

No pause deletes anything, bills anything, or disconnects anything. Everything that arrived during a pause is in your Inbox; your Workflows, accounts, and history are untouched; and the way back is always one of the actions in the table above.

Related

• How automation billing works — the allowance and the 80/90/100% notices
• Extra usage and spend caps — the opt-in that keeps automation running past the allowance
• Team seats and the seat picker — the other kind of pause, for people
• Webhooks by plan, and the downgrade grace — the other other kind, for endpoints