Conversations limits

The Conversations API has a few limits that you should be aware of when building conversational messaging features.

These limits are enforced at the Conversation, Participant, Message, and Operation levels.

Length limits

Counter Limits

Participants per Conversation

A Conversation can have up to 50 non-Chat participants and up to 1000 including Chat.

Maximum channels/conversations per identity

A Chat identity (Chat user) can be part of 1000 Conversations and Chat Channels. Adding a participant whose identity already belongs to 1000 or more Conversations/Chat Channels will result in an error.

Channels per Service Instance

Unlimited. Each Service Instance can hold as many channels as you wish!

Media Limits

Media limits from Chat-based Participants

Any media file type of up to 150MB is supported between chat-based participants. The Chat client must contain logic for Chat members to consume media of the various types.

JPG, PNG, MP3, AMR, MP4 and PDF files with a filesize of less than 5MB will be delivered from Chat-based to SMS participants. If a message originating from a Chat SDK client contains a media file greater than 5MB, it will not be fanned out as an MMS message. However, Chat SDK consumers will still be able to retrieve the media file.

WhatsApp messages are currently limited to media files up to 16MB.

Media limits from non-Chat participants

For non-Chat-based participants, the channel (e.g., MMS or WhatsApp) limits apply. A single MMS message can contain no more than 10 media files, and the total size of all media within the message cannot exceed 5 MB. (Please see Accepted Content Types for Media.)

Any single file cannot exceed 2 MB, but take note that a carrier may impose further limits on file size.

A single WhatsApp message may contain one piece of media, of maximum size 16 MB. Supported filetypes include JPG, PNG, MP3, AMR, MP4 and PDF.

Operational Limits

APS ("Actions per Second")

An action is an operation that mutates the state of a Conversation and other resources, such as sending a message, updating the friendly_name of a Conversation, or adding/removing a participant etc. Read actions are not limited under APS.

All operations are rate-limited with a default maximum set at 30 APS. Some operations are rate limited globally, or per Service, while others are limited per conversation. Refer to the table below to see each resource, and whether its action is limited per Service or per Conversation.