Messaging Limits and Quality Rating: How to Scale Safely

Your number has two health signals: a quality rating (green / yellow / red) and a messaging limit (business-initiated conversations per rolling 24 hours).

The tiers

• 250 (unverified) → 1,000 → 10,000 → 100,000 → unlimited

You move up when you hit roughly half your current limit within a 7-day window while staying green, and business verification is complete. You move down when quality goes red and stays there.

What actually drives quality

Meta looks at signals from recipients over the last 24 hours to 7 days:

• Blocks — the heaviest penalty.
• Reports ("report business") — heavier still per event.
• Low engagement patterns on marketing templates.

Volume alone does not hurt you. Irrelevant volume does.

The warm-up plan

Week 1: 200–300 messages/day to your most engaged customers (recent buyers, active support contacts). Utility templates only. Week 2: 500–800/day, introduce one marketing template to a segment that bought in the last 90 days. Week 3: Scale to your limit, keeping marketing under a third of total volume. Week 4: Request the next tier by simply sustaining volume; it upgrades automatically.

Recovering from yellow or red

1. Pause all marketing immediately.
2. Send only utility messages for 3–7 days.
3. Audit the last campaign: which segment, which template, what frequency.
4. Remove non-engagers (no open, no reply in 90 days) permanently.
5. Resume marketing at a quarter of previous volume.

Ratings recover in about a week of clean behaviour. Repeated red states can lead to a permanent limit reduction, so treat the first yellow as an incident, not a warning.

Operating discipline

• Cap marketing frequency at one message per contact per week.
• Always include a footer opt-out line.
• Watch the failure log — high "invalid recipient" rates mean a dirty list, and dirty lists precede red ratings.