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Add up every programme mailing a subscriber, read the peak weekly touches against a comfort ceiling, and get a frequency-cap value that protects your must-send mail. Runs entirely in your browser.
Mark triggered and lifecycle streams Essential so the suggested cap is set above them — a cap that blocks a password reset or an onboarding step is worse than the fatigue it prevents.
Share of the list in more than one programme. 100% is the conservative worst case.
Indicative touches per subscriber per week. Set it from your own unsubscribe data.
The comfort ceiling is indicative, not a rule. Most B2C lists tolerate a few marketing touches a week before complaint and unsubscribe rates start to climb, but the real number is specific to your list, stage mix and vertical. Treat the default as a starting line and tune it against what your own data shows.
A fully enrolled subscriber can receive 4.5 touches a week against a 4/week ceiling. This is where fatigue signals tend to climb — cap it or thin the calendar.
Typical
4.5
at 100% overlap
Busiest one
2
single programme
Cap subscribers here and exempt the essential programmes, so the ceiling constrains promotional volume only.
Checks
Warning: Peak of 4.5 touches is over your 4/week ceiling
A subscriber enrolled in every programme can receive more than your comfort ceiling in a week. Apply a frequency cap, exempt the essential programmes, and let it trim the promotional overage.
Note: Assuming full overlap (worst case)
At 100% overlap the typical read equals the peak — everyone is treated as enrolled in every programme. Lower the overlap to the real share of your list in multiple programmes for a truer typical exposure.
The stack
Heaviest first. The running total (Σ) is where a fully enrolled subscriber sits after each programme; anything past your 4/week ceiling is marked over the line. The cadence question covers how to set the ceiling.
More sends lift short-term revenue and cost you long-term list health as fatigue, unsubscribes and complaints build. The cap is where you decide that trade deliberately rather than one campaign at a time.
Every programme you run mails the same subscriber. The newsletter does not know the promo stream exists, the win-back does not know about lifecycle, and the person on your list receives the sum of all of it. Send frequency is the one deliverability lever that no single campaign owner can see — which is exactly why it needs planning at the programme level, not the send level.
A subscriber enrolled in every programme receives the sum of every programme's cadence in a week. That peak is what drives fatigue — the unsubscribe, the spam complaint, the quiet disengagement — not the tidy average across your whole list. Average frequency hides the problem: half your list can be getting a comfortable one email a week while your most engaged, most valuable segment is buried under six, because engagement is what enrols people in more programmes.
So the planner leads with the peak: add the weekly cadence of every programme and read the worst case first. If the peak is comfortable, the average certainly is. If the peak is over the line, the average will tell you everything is fine right up until your best customers leave.
Not every subscriber is in every programme. The overlap assumption — the share of your list enrolled across more than one programme — is what scales the raw sum down to a realistic typical exposure. At zero overlap, the busiest a subscriber gets is your single heaviest programme. At full overlap, everyone gets the whole stack. The truth is in between, and you set it, because only you know how your programmes share an audience.
The conservative default is full overlap, because planning against the worst case is the safe direction to be wrong in. As you learn your real overlap from your ESP, lower it — but keep protecting the peak, because the subscriber getting the full stack is almost always your most engaged one, the one you can least afford to fatigue.
A frequency cap is a ceiling on how many messages one subscriber receives in a period, enforced across every programme at once — the only control that sees the whole picture. It is how you decide the revenue-versus-fatigue trade deliberately, once, instead of re-fighting it campaign by campaign. Set it and the promo stream that would have been a subscriber's fifth email that week simply does not send.
The trap is capping the wrong mail. A cap that blocks a password reset, an order confirmation or an onboarding step is worse than the fatigue it was meant to prevent. That is why programmes are tagged essential or promotional here: the suggested cap is set above your essential floor and the promotional mail is what gets trimmed. If your must-send mail alone is over the ceiling, the planner says so — because that is a programme-design problem a cap cannot fix.
The reason frequency is hard is that the short-term incentive always points up. One more send this week reliably books more revenue this week, and the cost — fatigue, unsubscribes, slow disengagement, a worse sender reputation — arrives later and lands on a different quarter's numbers. Every individual campaign owner is right to want to send, which is how lists get quietly over-mailed with nobody ever making the decision to do it.
Planning frequency is how you make that trade on purpose. It does not mean sending less for its own sake — a well-run onboarding sequence is intense by design. It means knowing where the peak sits, deciding what ceiling your list actually tolerates from your own data, and holding the line with a cap so the short-term pull of one more send does not spend down the long-term asset that is a subscriber who still opens.
Built into Orbit
Orbit's lifecycle tooling reads your live programme calendar and flags where cadences stack past a comfort ceiling before a subscriber ever feels it. Claude can model a frequency cap across your programmes, keep the essential mail exempt, and read the fatigue signal back to you from your own unsubscribe data.
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