heartbeat

an agent that only acts when you type is a tool. yours also wakes up on its own, looks around, and decides whether there is anything worth doing: a reminder due, a watcher to check, a scheduled job to run. that wake-up is the heartbeat. this page is how often it happens, what it costs, and the one number worth knowing.

what is a heartbeat?

a short, cheap check-in. on a schedule you set, your agent starts a turn without a message from you, reads its notes and its task list, does anything that is due, and stops. most heartbeats end with nothing to do, which is the point: it is how it notices the one that does.

it uses the lightest model for the check, so a heartbeat costs a fraction of a normal message.

how often does it happen?

you choose the interval on the dashboard at instaclaw.io/heartbeat. a shorter interval makes it more responsive to things that change during the day; a longer one uses less of its pool. every hour is responsive. every twelve hours is nearly free. there is no wrong answer; it depends on whether your agent is watching anything time-sensitive.

what does it cost?

heartbeats draw from their own pool of 100 credits a day. they do not spend your plan's daily allowance, so a busy background can never use up the credits you wanted for a conversation. when the heartbeat pool for the day is used up, heartbeats stop until it resets and your conversations are unaffected.

more frequent heartbeats use more of that pool. if you set a short interval and find the pool running out before evening, lengthen the interval; nothing else changes.

what does it do during one?

whatever is due. a scheduled task whose time has come, a watcher you asked it to keep, a follow-up it promised you. it does not start new work on its own initiative during a heartbeat; it does the things you already asked for. scheduled tasks is how you give it those.

can i turn it off?

set the longest interval, and it will barely check in at all. if you want it silent for a while, say so:

stop checking in until i tell you otherwise

it will confirm and stay quiet.

what this page does not promise

an exact credit count per interval. it depends on how much your agent finds to do when it wakes up, so any single figure would be wrong for someone. the pool is the number to plan around: 100 a day, separate from your plan.

what next

• scheduled tasks: the jobs a heartbeat runs when they are due
• plans and billing: your plan's own allowance, which the heartbeat never touches
• talking to your agent: what to expect when it pauses for the day