Every dashboard screen has a bell in its header. It shows how many notifications you haven't opened yet, and it is the one place to find what big has told you, whether or not you saw the email.

The bell

• The count is your unread notifications in the workspace you're in. It updates when you open the bell; there's no live polling, and nothing here needs a refresh to be accurate at the moment you look.
• Open a notification to mark it read and go where it's about. A usage-cap notice, for example, takes you to Settings → Billing. A notification with nowhere to go is simply marked read.
• Mark all read clears the count for this workspace. Read notifications stay in the list for a while (see below) and are simply no longer bold.

Per workspace

What you see follows the workspace you're in. If you belong to more than one, each workspace's notifications appear only while that workspace is active, so a count from one never bleeds into the other. Leave a workspace and its notifications leave with it; if you're added back, they return.

What notifies you today

• The weekly usage cap — when your workspace crosses 80% of its cap, and again when it reaches 100%, the workspace owner gets a notification. Once per threshold per week, and never a "you're approaching" notice for a workspace that has already hit it. See Plans for what the cap covers and what happens at 100%.

• A renewal that needs you — the workspace owner is notified when a renewal payment fails, and when your bank asks for an extra confirmation (3D Secure) before it will go through. Once per invoice, not once per retry. Both open Settings → Billing, where Manage billing takes you to Stripe to pay the invoice or update your card. The confirmation one matters most: until you act, the renewal stays unpaid, and an unpaid renewal drops the workspace to the free tier a few days after the renewal date.

• A suspension — if your workspace is suspended, the owner is notified with the reason, and gets the same message by email. It is the only place the reason appears, and it explains what a suspension pauses and what it leaves alone. See If your workspace is suspended.

More kinds will land here as they ship; anything big tells you about your workspace will arrive through the same bell. The product-update email is the one thing that doesn't — it is a separate, opt-in channel and never appears here. See Product updates.

Email

Every notification is also sent by email to the same person, using the same words. The bell is the record: if an email doesn't arrive, the notification is still in the app, and nothing is lost. These are account-status messages, not marketing, so there's no unsubscribe link and every plan gets them.

big does send one other kind of email — an occasional product-update digest — and it is a separate channel end to end: a separate list you joined with the waitlist, a separate sender, and an unsubscribe link in every send. Unsubscribing from it changes nothing here: the account notices above have no unsubscribe link because they are not something you can be unsubscribed from, and they keep arriving either way. See Product updates.

Retention

Notifications you've opened are cleared once they're 90 days old — the clock runs from when big sent it, not from when you opened it, so opening an old one doesn't extend it. Unread notifications are kept however old they get, until you open them.

Dashboard only

Notifications are for the person in the app; there is no CLI, MCP, or API surface for them, and every plan gets them. A request made with a personal access token gets a 403 that says the endpoint is dashboard-only. Everything a notification reports — usage, billing state — is already readable on the surfaces those tokens can reach.