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Quiet hours hold broadcast sends during a window you set, so a promotion never lands at 3 AM; the marketing frequency cap limits how many marketing broadcasts one contact can receive from your business within a period you choose, on top of whatever Meta's own limits already allow. Both are organization-wide settings, off by default, configured once under Settings, Broadcasts.
Quiet hours and frequency cap
- 1Open Settings, Broadcasts
- 2Turn on Quiet hours if you want
- 3Turn on the Marketing frequency cap if
- 4Click Save
- 5Confirm the setting applies on your next
Before you start
- You need access to Settings, Broadcasts, typically an Owner or Admin role.
- Know your organization's configured time zone, since quiet hours are expressed in it, not in each individual recipient's local time (that is a separate per-campaign option, "Use each recipient's local time," on the Schedule step).
- Decide realistic values before turning these on; an overly wide quiet window or an overly strict frequency cap can meaningfully shrink how many campaigns actually reach people, which is the intended trade-off but worth setting deliberately.
Steps
- Open Settings, Broadcasts. Two cards appear: Quiet hours and Marketing frequency cap, each with its own checkbox.
Turn on Quiet hours if you want one. Check the box, then set From and until hours from the dropdowns (for example, from 21:00 until 09:00). The card's description states plainly: "Campaigns due inside this window wait until it ends instead of sending. A promotion at 3am earns blocks, and blocks are what Meta suspends numbers over."
Turn on the Marketing frequency cap if you want one. Check the box, then set At most N campaigns per M days, choosing N from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 or 10 and M from 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days.
Click Save. A confirmation notice ("Saved") appears briefly next to the button.
Confirm the setting applies on your next campaign. On the Schedule step of a new broadcast, "Hold sends during quiet hours" is on by default and references this org-wide window in its helper text.
What you will see
Once quiet hours are on, a broadcast scheduled to fire inside the window (or a send-immediately campaign launched during it) waits automatically until the window ends, visible on the campaign as a brief delay before sending actually begins; it does not change the campaign's status to Paused, it simply holds. Once a frequency cap is on, a contact who has already received the cap's limit of marketing campaigns within the chosen period is automatically left out of the next one's audience, the same as any other audience exclusion, without any error or notice interrupting the send.
Why do these exist alongside Meta's own limits?
Meta enforces its own per-user marketing cap (error 131049), adaptive and shared across every business that messages a given WhatsApp user, but it does not tell any individual business what that cap actually is, and it does nothing about a business messaging the same person every single day within whatever headroom that cap allows. A business could technically stay under Meta's cap while still messaging a contact far more often than that contact wants, and "we got three campaigns in one week" or "it arrived at 3 AM" are exactly the complaints this category of tool hears most often when neither control exists.
Quiet hours and the frequency cap give your organization its own additional, visible limits on top of whatever Meta separately enforces. They are deliberately simple, one window, one count over one period, rather than a complex rules engine, because the honest version of this feature is a blunt guardrail a business owner can set once and trust, not a system that needs constant tuning to behave sensibly.
Example
A D2C store sets quiet hours from 22:00 to 08:00 and a frequency cap of 2 campaigns per 7 days. A flash-sale broadcast scheduled for 11 PM automatically waits until 8 AM to actually send, and a contact who already received two marketing campaigns that week is left out of a third one, without anyone having to remember either rule manually.
Settings and options
| Setting | What it does | Options | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quiet hours (on/off) | Holds sends that would fall inside the window until it ends | Checkbox | Off |
| Quiet hours window | The start and end hour of the window | Any hour to any hour, in your org's time zone | 21:00 to 09:00 when first enabled |
| Marketing frequency cap (on/off) | Limits how many marketing broadcasts one contact receives in a period | Checkbox | Off |
| Cap count | Maximum marketing campaigns per contact per period | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 | 2 when first enabled |
| Cap period | The rolling window the count applies over | 1, 3, 7, 14, 30 days | 7 days when first enabled |
What is a sensible starting point for these values?
There is no universally correct number, but a reasonable default mirrors ordinary business hours and typical marketing cadence: quiet hours from around 21:00 to 09:00 keeps sends out of the late evening and overnight, and a frequency cap of 2 marketing campaigns per 7 days keeps a contact from feeling bombarded while still leaving room for a genuinely time-sensitive second send in the same week, a flash sale on top of a scheduled weekly newsletter, for example. These happen to be the values VGraple CRM pre-fills the moment you first check either box, precisely because they are a safe, defensible starting point rather than an arbitrary example; adjust them once you have a real sense of your own audience's tolerance and your own sending cadence.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A campaign scheduled for a specific time sent later than expected | It fell inside the quiet hours window and waited until the window ended | Expected behavior; schedule outside the window next time, or turn off "Hold sends during quiet hours" for that specific campaign if intentional |
| A contact is missing from a marketing campaign's audience with no obvious reason | They have already received the frequency cap's limit of marketing campaigns within the configured period | Check the org's frequency cap setting under Settings, Broadcasts; this is expected, not a bug |
| Frequency cap does not seem to affect a utility template send | Correct behavior; the cap only applies to marketing broadcasts | No action needed; utility and service messages are never capped by this setting |
| Quiet hours setting does not seem to change anything | The checkbox may not have been saved, or the campaign had "Hold sends during quiet hours" turned off individually | Re-check Settings, Broadcasts was saved; confirm the per-campaign toggle on the Schedule step |
| Unsure what time zone quiet hours use | It is your organization's configured time zone, named directly in the setting's own description | Check the description text next to the Quiet hours checkbox for the exact zone in use |
How do these settings interact with a campaign's own schedule options?
Quiet hours and the frequency cap are organization-wide defaults, but a single campaign can still make its own choice about quiet hours specifically: the Schedule step's "Hold sends during quiet hours" checkbox is on by default for every new broadcast, inheriting the org-wide window, but can be turned off for that one campaign if you have a deliberate, specific reason for it to send regardless, for example a genuinely time-sensitive alert. The frequency cap has no equivalent per-campaign override; it applies uniformly to every marketing broadcast an organization sends, by design, since a cap that individual campaign owners could quietly disable for themselves would stop protecting contacts from the exact over-messaging pattern it exists to prevent.
Related reading
See why a recipient was suppressed for how this org-level cap differs from Meta's own frequency-cap suppression, and building a broadcast audience for how exclusions like this one combine with the rest of your targeting.