Plans, AI checks and limits

A Formsieve plan gives your key a number of AI checks a month, shared by all the sites on the key, and a number of sites. The AI is included in the price. This page explains what counts, what happens near and above the limit, and how to protect your allowance during a spam wave.

The plans

As of 2026-09-25 (prices in US dollars, tax excluded; current prices at https://formsieve.com/pricing/):

Every plan includes every feature and every form plugin Formsieve supports (Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7, as of 2026-09-26). A month is the calendar month in UTC. Unused checks do not carry over.

What counts as an AI check

An AI check is one submission for which Formsieve's service returns a fresh AI result.

Counts:

• a visitor's submission that passed the local filters and was checked;
• a Re-check you start from a Gravity Forms entry's Formsieve panel;
• a WP-CLI sample (wp formsieve test <form_id>);
• submissions from staging and development sites.

Does not count:

• submissions stopped by the free local filters: honeypot, time-to-submit check, rate limit, lists, disposable e-mail domains, the replay cache, trivial content and allow-listed senders (Pre-filters);
• Test connection, the daily key check and the usage refresh;
• errors, and answers refused because your checks are paused, your plan is not active or the site is not on your plan;
• the plugin's one automatic retry of the same submission (it reuses the request's idempotency key, so the service answers it without counting it again);
• Test mode, which sends nothing.

What counts as a site

• One production site address counts as one site. The address is compared in lower case, without https://, www. or a trailing slash.
• Each subsite of a multisite network counts as a site.
• Staging and development sites are free. Addresses such as localhost, IP addresses, *.test, *.local, *.localhost, *.invalid, *.example, and addresses whose first part is staging, stage, dev or test, as well as sites whose WordPress environment type is not production, never use a site slot. Their AI checks count against the allowance. Solo and Pro keys accept at most 10 such sites. The Free plan covers one production site. Staging and development sites need a paid plan (as of 2026-09-29).
• Fair use on Agency and Scale: sites you own, and sites you build or maintain for your clients. Bundling the key into hosting plans needs a Custom plan.
• Remove a site in your account (Sites → Remove) to free its slot at once. A removed site that sends a check again is registered again if a slot is free.

When a new production site would go over your plan's site limit, the service refuses its checks ("Not checked by AI: this site is not on your plan"), and Test connection says so.

Near and above the allowance

1. 80% and 100%: we e-mail the account owner, and Formsieve shows a notice on its own admin pages.
2. Between 100% and the ceiling: checks continue. Spam waves are exactly when a site goes over, so protection does not stop at 100%. There is no extra charge.
3. At the ceiling: checks pause until the next month starts or you upgrade.
4. Three months in a row over the allowance: the first two months get warnings (the second one a "last warning"). From the third month, checks pause at 100% until you upgrade. An upgrade resets the count.

Upgrades apply at once, with the new allowance, and you pay the prorated difference. Downgrades apply from your next renewal. See Getting a Formsieve key.

When checks are paused or the plan is not active

Formsieve never blocks a form because of billing. When checks are paused, the trial has ended, the subscription has lapsed, or the site is not on your plan:

• the local filters still run on every submission;
• submissions that pass them are delivered unchecked, with a note such as "Not checked by AI: monthly allowance used", "Not checked by AI: no active Formsieve plan" or "Not checked by AI: this site is not on your plan" on the entry (Gravity Forms) or in Flamingo and the Formsieve log (Contact Form 7);
• if you set When the AI check cannot answer to Hold for review (new in 1.1.0), they are held for review instead;
• Fail closed never applies to billing states. It applies only to outages;
• Formsieve checks again every 15 minutes, so checks resume on their own once you upgrade or the month resets.

Besides the plan's ceiling and the three-months rule (see "Near and above the allowance" above), AI checks can pause for these reasons. Each has its own note and its own entry in Troubleshooting:

• Fair-use limit. Next to its monthly AI checks, each key has a monthly fair-use limit on the amount of submission text the AI processes (as of 2026-09-27). It is not a number of AI checks. It is reached when a key's forms send far more text than typical contact forms, for example very long, padded or machine-generated text. AI checks then pause until the 1st (00:00 UTC); on a trial the limit covers the whole trial. Note: "Not checked by AI: paused under the fair-use limit" (Troubleshooting).
• Daily limit. Each key also has a daily limit on AI processing, so that one key cannot use up capacity that all customers share (as of 2026-09-27). It is reached after unusually high use in one UTC day. AI checks then pause until 00:00 UTC. Note: "Not checked by AI: paused until 00:00 UTC" (Troubleshooting).
• Free plan allowance. The Free plan has 100 AI checks a month for one production site (as of 2026-09-27). At 100, AI checks pause until the 1st (00:00 UTC) or until you choose a paid plan; there is no ceiling above the allowance. Note: "Not checked by AI: this month's free AI checks are used" (Troubleshooting).
• Free capacity. All Free keys share a limited AI capacity for each day and each month (as of 2026-09-27). When it is used, AI checks on Free keys pause until 00:00 UTC the next day, or until the 1st, even if the key still has Free AI checks left. To protect the service, Formsieve can also pause the Free plan's AI checks until further notice ("AI checks on the Free plan are paused for now"). Paid plans are not affected. Note: "Not checked by AI: the Free plan's capacity is used for now" (Troubleshooting).

In each case the rules above apply: your forms keep working, submissions are delivered (or held for review), and paused answers do not count as AI checks.

Seeing what you spend

• In WordPress: the Formsieve Dashboard shows your plan card: plan and status, "AI checks this month: 1,234 of 2,000" with a meter marked at 80% and 100%, sites used, the renewal or trial end date, and links to your account. It refreshes when you open the tab, at most every 15 minutes, and never on your visitors' page loads.
• In your account at https://formsieve.com/account/: checks per day for the last 90 days, per site, with the allowance line, months over the allowance, and a CSV export.
• The decision log and the entry panel still show each verdict with its probability, category, model, request ID and latency.

Caps

Protect your allowance: most AI checks per form per hour (under Settings → Detection; it applies to each form separately) limits how many submissions to one form are sent for an AI check in the same clock hour. 0 means no limit (the default). When it is reached, further submissions to that form in that hour are not sent and follow your fail mode: by default they are delivered unchecked with the note "Not checked (hourly cap reached)" (Gravity Forms) or "Formsieve: not checked (hourly cap reached)" (Contact Form 7). The local filters still apply. A sensible start for a small business site is 30 per form per hour.

The monthly cap of version 1.0 is hidden with a Formsieve key: your plan's allowance and ceiling do that job.

During a spam flood

1. The local filters and the replay cache absorb most of it without using checks.
2. The per-form hourly cap stops the rest from using up your allowance.
3. Above 100%, checks continue up to your plan's ceiling, and you get e-mails at 80% and 100%.
4. If the service or the AI model is failing, the circuit breaker stops calls for 10 minutes after 5 failures within 5 minutes, then tries one request. Submissions follow your fail mode (delivered by default).
5. Consider switching on Aggressive mode or the High preset for the duration.