Pricing & billing

The two things you can be billed for

There's no flat subscription fee by itself — what you pay for is the storage you've committed to (pledged) and, only once you're already paying for storage, any bandwidth that had to go through our relay instead of directly between devices.

How pledged storage is counted

A "pledge" is the amount you've agreed to store on your buddy's behalf — set when an invite is created and redeemed. Your billable total is the sum of every active pairing you're part of, whichever side of it you're on:

1. You pair with a buddy for, say, 500GB. That pairing now counts 500GB toward both of your pledged totals — it's the same number on both sides, since you're each agreeing to store that much for the other.
2. The first 50GB of your total is free. If all your pairings add up to 50GB or less, you never need a subscription at all.
3. Anything past 50GB needs an active subscription. Pledging more than the free allowance (via a new invite or redeeming one) requires a paid account — this is enforced at the moment the pledge is made, not discovered later.
4. The subscription quantity tracks your pledges automatically. Add a new buddy, or one of your pairings ends, and your Stripe subscription's storage quantity — and your prorated charge for the rest of the billing period — updates right away.

How relay usage is measured and billed

1. Your client tracks every byte's path. For each transfer, it knows whether the data went directly to your buddy's device or had to be relayed.
2. It reports relay usage roughly every 30 seconds. Just the megabytes relayed since the last report — never file contents, since the relay itself never sees anything but already-encrypted ciphertext.
3. Usage is only recorded for paid accounts. If you're on the free tier, your client still reports it, but the server discards it — it's never billed and never shows up as a charge.
4. We sync usage to Stripe every 15 minutes. This just records a "meter event" — a data point, not a charge. Nothing happens to your card at this point.
5. Once a month, at your normal renewal date, it's all totaled up. Stripe adds up every meter event from that billing period into a single relay-bandwidth line item, alongside your storage line item, on one invoice.
6. Your card is charged once. Never per report, never per relay session — one combined charge per month, same as any ordinary subscription renewal.

Worked example

Say you pledge 500GB to a buddy (so they're pledging 500GB back to you too — one pairing, same number both ways), and over the course of a month your network's NAT blocks direct connections often enough that about 2.5GB of your transfers that month went through the relay instead.

That $1.37 is a single charge on your card at your subscription's normal monthly renewal date — the two line items (storage and relay) appear separately on the invoice for transparency, but they're never billed separately. If that same month your direct connection had worked for every transfer, the relay line would simply read 0 GB / $0.00, and you'd pay $1.32.

What never costs anything

• Pledges of 50GB or less, total. No subscription, no card on file, nothing.
• Direct peer-to-peer traffic. The normal case for most home and office networks — only bytes that go through the relay are ever metered.
• Backing up, restoring, and checking buddy status. These aren't separately billed actions — they're just what pledged storage and relay bandwidth (if used) already cover.
• Relay use on a free account. Tracked for diagnostics only, never billed, until you have an active paid subscription.