Limits & Plans
Free and paid tiers, compute units explained, enforcement rules.
What TrailStack costs and how limits work.
Free tier
No credit card required. No expiration.
| Resource | Limit |
|---|---|
| Storage | 1 GB logical |
| Compute | 0.25 CU |
| Max query runtime | 1 minute |
Paid tier
No minimum commitment. Upgrade from the billing page.
| Resource | Rate |
|---|---|
| Storage | $0.025/GB-month logical, unlimited |
| Compute | $20/CU-month |
| Max query runtime | 30 minutes |
| Ingestion | Free |
How compute works
1 CU handles one concurrent analytics workflow — a person refreshing dashboards or running queries. Add more CU for more concurrency. CU does not scale with data size.
| CU | What it handles | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 0.25 (free) | Ad-hoc queries, a few per minute | Free |
| 1 | One dashboard workflow | $20/month |
| 2 | Team of 3-5 sharing dashboards | $40/month |
Under the hood: 1 CU refills at 1 CPU-second per second with a burst of 1,800 CPU-seconds. If you exhaust your budget, you get a clear error. Your next query works as soon as the budget refills — within seconds.
What it costs in practice
Assumes 1 KB average event size and 1-month retention:
| Scale | Storage | Compute | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M events/month (1 GB) | Free | 0.25 CU | Free |
| 10M events/month (10 GB) | $0.25 | 1 CU ($20) | $20.25 |
| 100M events/month (100 GB) | $2.50 | 1 CU ($20) | $22.50 |
| 1B events/month (1 TB) | $25 | 1 CU ($20) | $45 |
1 CU per concurrent analytics workflow. Add $20/CU for each additional. Longer retention means proportionally more storage — use the pricing page retention toggle to estimate.
Storage & limits
Storage is measured as logical bytes — the byteSize() of all ClickHouse record row fields across your Spaces. This is the uncompressed size of your data. Only persisted data counts toward your storage — internal transport is not billed.
The free tier has a 1 GB cap:
| Threshold | What happens |
|---|---|
| 80% of 1 GB | Warning banner in the console |
| 100% of 1 GB | Ingestion blocked. Data stays readable and queryable. |
To unblock, upgrade to paid (removes the cap) or delete data. The paid tier has no storage cap — storage is metered at $0.025/GB-month.
What happens if you cancel
When a paid user cancels or payment fails:
- Immediate downgrade to free tier limits.
- Data stays readable for 90 days.
- After 90 days, all data is deleted unconditionally.
Stripe Smart Retries run 3-4 attempts over about 3 weeks before the grace period starts. A single card glitch does not trigger the countdown. See Stripe's Cancel subscriptions docs for the underlying behavior.
To reactivate, update your payment method on the billing page. Your data and Spaces are restored immediately.