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Set guardrails and credit limits

Guardrails are the limits that apply to every automation at once: when messages may be sent, how often one client may hear from you, and how much you are willing to spend. They are switched on from the start with sensible values, so marketing is safe before you touch anything.

📍 Where to find this: Left navigation menu → Marketing → Automations → Guardrails

✅ What you can do

Block sends during the night with quiet hours
Cap how many marketing messages one client can receive in a month
Get warned when your credit balance drops, and stop when a monthly budget is reached
Pause a recipe automatically when too many clients unsubscribe

🛡️ Open the guardrails

Click Marketing → Automations in the left navigation menu.
Scroll to the Guardrails card, which summarises all four settings at a glance.
Click Adjust guardrails.

Guardrails summary card showing quiet hours, frequency cap, credit protection and list protection

🌙 Quiet hours

Set From and to. No marketing message is sent between those times.

Quiet hours and frequency cap settings in the Guardrails dialog

Nothing is lost during quiet hours. A message that becomes due at 22:00 is simply held and goes out when quiet hours end, so a birthday greeting still arrives on the right day.

ℹ️ Quiet hours follow your clinic's own timezone, not the client's. The default window is 20:00 to 09:00.

🔁 Frequency cap

Set Send at most (number) marketing messages per client per month. The default is 7, and any value from 1 to 30 is allowed.

Two rules work together here:

The monthly cap counts every automation combined, not each one separately. A client cannot receive seven rebooking reminders and seven birthday greetings.
One message per day, always. If two recipes come due for the same client on the same day, one goes out and the other waits.

ℹ️ The monthly count resets at the start of each calendar month, in your clinic's timezone. Messages that failed to send are refunded and do not count against a client's allowance.

💳 Credit protection

Credit protection and list protection settings in the Guardrails dialog

Field	What it does
Warn me when credits drop below	Alerts you once your balance falls under this number, so you can top up before sends start failing
Monthly credit budget	Pauses every automation for the rest of the month once this many credits have been used on marketing

Both are optional. Leave a field empty and that limit is not applied at all.

⚠️ A reached budget stops every automation for the remainder of the month, not just the recipe that spent the most. Sending resumes by itself at the start of the next month. Set the budget as a ceiling you are comfortable with, not as a target.

ℹ️ A single recipe can also have its own ceiling, separate from the clinic-wide budget. Open Configure on any card and set Monthly credit cap for this automation.

📉 List protection

Turn on Auto-pause on unsubscribe spike, then set Pause when unsubscribe rate exceeds as a multiple, for example 3×. Values from 1.5 to 10 are allowed.

MERIDIQ compares a recipe's unsubscribe rate against its normal rate. If it climbs past your multiple, that recipe stops sending and you are alerted. Its card then shows Paused by list protection, along with the rate that triggered it, and a Review message button; fix the wording and click Resume.

Where the alerts arrive

Both list protection and the low-credit warning reach you the same way: a bell notification inside MERIDIQ and an email to your clinic's address, with a link straight to the page you need — the automation for a spike, your credit balance for a low balance.

ℹ️ You will not be buried in them. Each alert is sent at most once a day, however many sends happen in between.

ℹ️ This protects the asset that matters most. A client who unsubscribes is gone from marketing for good, so catching a badly worded message after a handful of opt-outs is far better than after a hundred.

🚫 Why a message was skipped

Guardrails never fail silently. Open Logs on any recipe and each skipped or failed row states its reason in plain words.

Reason shown	What happened	Does it retry?
Skipped — monthly message limit for this client reached	The frequency cap was hit	No, that client is done for the month
Skipped — another marketing SMS was sent in the last 24h	The one-per-day spacing rule	Yes, on a later run
Skipped — this automation's monthly credit cap reached	That recipe's own credit cap	Yes, next month
Skipped — monthly marketing budget reached	The clinic-wide credit budget	Yes, next month
Failed — missing or invalid mobile number	The client has no number that can receive SMS	No, fix the client's number
Failed — send was interrupted and could not be confirmed	Something interrupted the send and MERIDIQ cannot tell whether it arrived	No — it is not retried, precisely because it may already have been delivered

💡 If marketing feels too quiet, read the log before changing anything — see Turn on marketing automations. The reasons tell you whether the limits are holding messages back or whether simply nobody is due.

Updated on: 19/08/2026

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