Fair Use

Storm Cellar's free tier comes with a monthly egress cap and a sustained-throughput review threshold. Both are written down, both are predictable, and neither will quietly stop your traffic without you knowing.

What's in the free tier

Storage, bucket, and key limits are enforced at the dashboard. Ingress and API operations are always free, regardless of tier. The two policies that need explaining are the egress cap and the throughput review.

The egress cap, exactly

Each free account gets 100 GB of outbound data per calendar month, counted across all GET, HEAD, and LIST responses across all buckets owned by the account. The counter resets at the start of each month (UTC).

When you hit the cap:

• S3 read requests (GET, HEAD, LIST) return HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header set to the next reset.

• Write requests (PUT, POST, DELETE) keep working. Your data stays safe; only the ability to pull it back out is paused.

• The dashboard shows your egress-used vs cap on the bucket and account pages.

That is the whole behavior. No automatic upgrade, no overage billing on the free tier, no suspension. Once the month rolls over, your downloads work again. If you need more before then, upgrade to pay-as-you-go (currently $9 USD per TB per month, linear).

Why 100 GB

100 GB is generous compared to common industry references:

100 GB is enough to sync a 10 GB Obsidian vault to four machines, restore a backup, or serve a small static site to a modest audience. It is not enough to host video streaming or a PeerTube instance. Those are paid use cases.

Sustained throughput

A sustained download rate above 50 Mbps for more than 60 minutes, from a single free account, triggers operator review. This applies regardless of whether the account has hit the 100 GB monthly cap.

The review is a human one. We email the account holder, ask what is happening, and work out a path forward. Suspension is a last resort and only after contact.

This threshold exists because Storm Cellar's alpha runs on a single VPS with a 100 Mbps line shared across all customers. One free account sustaining half the line for an hour materially degrades service for everyone else. Publishing the threshold means there are no surprises: if you have a workload that needs sustained throughput, upgrade to pay-as-you-go and the threshold goes away.

What this policy does not cover

• Ingress. Uploads are always free, on every tier, with no cap.

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

• Storage. The 10 GB storage limit is enforced separately at write time, not by this policy.

• Paid tier egress. Pay-as-you-go egress pricing is being finalized. During alpha, paid customers get egress on the same fair-use terms as free, scaled to the paid storage allocation.

Changes to this policy

If we tighten the 100 GB cap or the 50 Mbps threshold, existing accounts get at least 30 days notice by email before any change takes effect. If we loosen them, the change applies immediately and we mention it in the next Dispatch.

Founding Alpha accounts are not subject to the cap or the throughput review during alpha. Post-alpha policy for Founding Alpha is captured in the alpha invitation, not here.

Questions: contact@stormdevelopments.ca