Notifications

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.

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 3 days after the payment first fails.
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.
A new form response: each time someone submits one of your workspace's public forms, the workspace owner gets a notification, once per submission. It names the form and, when the form collects an email or Instagram handle, who sent it. The rest of their answers stay in big and are never put in the notice or the email. It opens that form's Responses tab. A response stored locked because the workspace is past its weekly cap doesn't notify. Anything typed in that field that isn't a real email or handle is left out. A workspace gets at most 60 of these notices an hour; past that, responses are still stored and shown on the Responses tab, they just don't notify.
An account that needs reconnecting: when Instagram or Facebook stops accepting big's access to one of your connected accounts, the workspace owner gets a notification and an email. That happens when a message is refused because the account's access was revoked (a password change, or big removed from the account's app settings, are the usual causes), or when big can't renew the account's access before it runs out. From that moment the account shows as expired on Connect, automation replies on it stop, and nothing new is charged against your weekly cap for it. Messages already waiting to go out from that account are not sent. Once per expiry: reconnecting the account starts its automations again, and a later expiry notifies you again. It opens the Connect page.
An integration that needs attention: when a tool your workspace connected by signing in, stops accepting big's access, every admin of the workspace gets a notification and an email. That happens when big's access was revoked or its app removed in the tool. The integration shows Reconnect needed and big stops reading that tool until an admin reconnects it. The same kind tells admins when someone in another big workspace tried to connect an account this workspace already holds (at most once a day per integration). Once each time an integration needs reconnecting. It opens the integration's page.

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 — muting an email (below) doesn't change that either. If the send itself fails — big's email provider having a bad moment, say — it's tried again for about a week; after that, or as soon as you've muted the kind, it stops trying. An email you already got is never sent a second time.

Two of the six kinds can be turned off; four can't:

The weekly usage cap always emails you, and there's no setting that stops it. At 100% your automation replies stop, and silence at that moment is exactly the failure this notice exists to prevent — a cap notice you could mute would defeat the point of having one.
A suspension always emails you too. A suspended workspace is the one situation where you may need to read what happened without signing in, the email is the only place the reason appears, and someone who has been locked out may simply never open the app again.
An account that needs reconnecting always emails you. Your automation replies on that account have stopped, and like the 100% cap notice, a quiet failure there is the thing the notice exists to prevent.
An integration that needs attention always emails you. big has stopped reading that tool, and nothing else will tell you until someone opens the integration.
A renewal that needs you can be turned off, with an exception inside it: the message asking your bank to confirm a payment (3D Secure) always sends even if you've muted the kind, because the renewal can't complete until you act on it. A declined-charge notice, where the state is already on your billing screen, respects the mute.
A new form response can be turned off, with no exception. A busy form sends one per submission, so this is the one most people quiet. Muting it stops the email and keeps the notification in the bell.

An email for a kind you can mute carries an Unsubscribe link in its footer, and the message itself carries List-Unsubscribe headers so your mail client can offer one-click unsubscribe too. Following either turns off that one kind for the workspace the email was about — it needs no login, and the page it lands on says plainly that the notice still appears in the bell. The link is good for 400 days from when it was sent, so an old email keeps working. The usage-cap, suspension, reconnect and integration emails, being unmutable, carry no unsubscribe link or header at all.

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 people joined through the waitlist before sign-up opened, a separate sender, and its own unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing from a digest changes nothing here, and muting an account notice above changes nothing about the digest. See Product updates.

Choosing which emails you get

Settings → Notifications lists every notification kind with a checkbox, one row per kind, plus a read-only note about the product-update digest and where to manage it. It's scoped to the workspace you're in — muting a kind here only stops that email for that workspace; the same kind still emails you in a workspace you haven't muted it in. Unchecking a box stops the email and nothing else: the bell keeps getting written, same as always. The usage-cap, suspension, reconnect and integration rows have no checkbox — they're always on, for the reasons above.

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.

From the CLI, MCP and API

Your notices are reachable with a personal access token too, on a plan with developer access. A token reads and marks only its own person's notices in the workspace it was minted in — never another member's:

List them — big notifications (add --unread for the unread ones) / big_notifications_list / GET /api/notifications, with the notifications:read scope.
Mark one read — big notification:read <id> / big_notification_mark_read / POST /api/notifications/:id/read, with notifications:write.
Mark them all read — big notifications:read-all / big_notifications_mark_all_read / POST /api/notifications/read-all, with notifications:write.

Every member, viewers included, can hold both scopes: they only ever touch your own notices. They are on the CLI and its local MCP server, not on the remote MCP server. Muting an email stays in Settings → Notifications, signed in — a token can read your email preferences (big notifications:preferences) but not change them, so a leaked token cannot silence your account mail.

What each notice reports is also readable on its own:

The weekly usage cap — big stats / big_workspace_stats / workspace_stats show usage against the cap.
An account that needs reconnecting — big connection:health / big_connection_health / connection_health.
An integration that needs attention — big integrations list / big_integration_status / integration_status.
A new form response — big form:responses / big_form_responses / list_form_responses.
A suspension — every token call answers 403 with code workspace_suspended.
A renewal that needs you — the plan and subscription status from big workspace / big_workspace_info / workspace_info; the invoice itself is in Settings → Billing.

Your email preferences are the one exception, and only for reading: a personal access token or MCP call can fetch which kinds are muted, so an agent can report your notification settings back to you. Changing them still needs the dashboard — a token can read the state but can't silence your account email.