FreeTable service pricing

The data in FreeTable is free. It may be redistributed subject only to the terms of the open data licensing agreement applicable to that data.

Your use of the FreeTable service is also free of charge provided it isn't excessive. Beyond some level it is necessary to impose prices in order to discourage unnecessary heavy use, or make heavy users share the costs of running the service. This is necessary because the cost of running FreeTable is currently $500 per month, and could easily exceed $2,000 per month once some additional scalability and reliability enhancements are made.

Through December 31, 2011 all use of the FreeTable service will be free of charge. If you want to know what happens after that read on.

The prices for use beyond a monthly free limit are:

  • $0.0005 per MB of inbound bandwidth
  • $0.002 per MB outbound bandwidth
  • $0.001 per compute unit(*)
  • $0.020 per MB-month of table storage(+)
    * - 1 compute unit is approximately equivalent to a 1GHz CPU for one second but also includes I/O latency costs if a transaction is disk bound.
    + - A dollar for dollar discount is offered on table storage costs, such that any revenue generated by the table is applied to reducing your table storage costs. This is so that if you design a large table that proves useful to others, you aren't left holding the bag as far as table storage costs are concerned.

The monthly discount is:

  • $5.00 for non-anonymous users
  • $0.01 for anonymous users

The monthly free amount for non-anonymous users is equivalent to:

  • 10,000MB of inbound bandwidth
  • 2,500MB outbound bandwidth
  • 5,000 compute units
  • 250MB of table storage
or some partial combination of all of these. For most applications this will be plenty.

The monthly free amount for anonymous users is assigned on a per IP address basis and is equivalent to:

  • 20MB of inbound bandwidth
  • 5MB of outbound bandwidth
  • 10 compute units
  • no table storage
or some partial combination of all of these. This is fairly puny. It is designed this way to encourage account signup and limit the potential for abuse such as the downloading or uploading of infringing content.

Price and storage limits

Separate from the monthly free limit, is the issue of a monthly price limit. The price limit exists so that whether by mistake or malice the user doesn't exceed a particular monthly expense. The default monthly price limit is US$0 for anonymous users, and US$500 for non-anonymous users. This price limit does not include any possible table storage charges. By default the aggregate table size limit is 5GB. This aggregate size limit is enforced prior to any discounting for revenue generated by the tables. These price and storage limits are only enforced approximately.