Pricing

Storm Buckets is in alpha. Signup is open and self-serve: anyone can create a
Storm account. Buckets alpha access is then activated per account by Storm, and
no account is billed during alpha. This page covers what alpha members get today
and how paid storage will work when billing turns on.

At a glance

Founding Alpha

Founding Alpha is the alpha program: everyone with Buckets access during alpha
is a Founding Alpha member. Access is activated per account by Storm, not by
closed invitation. Members receive:

• A 90 GB storage grant, permanent. It stays yours after alpha ends,
  on top of any paid storage you add later. It is never billed. The grant
  is larger the earlier you join: it steps down for each new group of
  founding members, so the first members carry the most. Your amount is set
  at signup and locked to your account for life, and
  feedback bounties add permanent storage on top
  in any cohort.

• All features unlocked during alpha: custom domains, static website
  hosting, no egress cap.

• The Founding Alpha marker on the account, permanently.

Post-alpha feature-access policy is captured in the alpha invitation.

What's always free

These never cost anything, during alpha or after:

• Ingress. Uploading data into Storm Buckets is free. No cap, no per-GB charge.

• API operations. GET, PUT, HEAD, LIST, DELETE, and admin calls are free,
  regardless of count.

• Buckets and keys. Creating them is free, and Storm does not charge by
  bucket or key count. Make the ones your project needs.

AWS and GCP meter S3 API calls at fractions of a cent per thousand requests.
Small money, but it means your bill moves with your request count. Storm does
not meter API calls, so yours never does.

How paid storage will work

Billing is not live during alpha. When it begins, paid storage is provisioned
in two block sizes, billed monthly:

• Playground block: 100 GB at $1 CAD. A real S3 sandbox for a dollar.
  Portfolios, static sites, learning. Stack as many as you need.

• Production block: 1 TB at $9 CAD. A full terabyte. Whether you store
  100 GB or 950 GB inside it, the bill is the same.

No free tier, by design. A free tier is a honeypot for bots and abuse, and
it pays for a crippled sandbox no one enjoys. A dollar keeps the noise out and
buys a real one.

No regrets when you stack. Eight 100 GB blocks cost $8 for 800 GB. On your
ninth, instead of charging $9 for 900 GB, Storm rounds you up to a full 1 TB
for the same $9, the last 100 GB on us. You never pay more for less by stacking
the small block.

No surprise bills, ever. Cross a block and the next one kicks in at its
listed price. There is no metered overage and no runaway invoice. Storm runs
real Canadian hardware in discrete units, not a fictional infinite cloud, and
block pricing is the honest version of that: you pay for capacity Storm has
actually allocated to you, and nothing else.

Hosting is included. Static site hosting and custom domains come with
every block, not as a separate line. The same bucket that stores your files
can serve them. See Public Access.

Egress

Every account gets a monthly egress allowance of 3x its total storage
capacity (paid blocks plus any Founding Alpha grant), reset each calendar
month. A Playground block is 300 GB out per month, a 1 TB account is 3 TB,
a 90 GB Founding Alpha grant is 270 GB.

Crossing the allowance throttles read throughput, it never stops your reads
and is never billed as overage. Writes keep working. The dashboard shows
egress used against the allowance. During alpha, egress is uncapped and the
figure is informational. Full detail and the alpha behavior are on the
Fair Use page.

Currency and billing

Prices are CAD. ServaRica, the upstream infrastructure provider, bills Storm
in CAD, so Canadian customers see CAD on invoices end-to-end. Customers outside
Canada are charged the CAD rate; their card issuer handles the FX conversion.
Billing, once live, runs monthly.

What's TBD

• Redundant durability (3-zone). Standard storage today is single-zone,
  RAID6-backed. A 3-zone class, priced separately, is on the roadmap.

• Storage classes (archive, cold). One class today. Cheaper-but-colder may
  come later.

Questions: contact@stormdevelopments.ca