Acceptable Use Policy

Unmetered means you're never charged for usage - every plan is a flat monthly price. To keep shared regions fast for everyone, non-dedicated plans are subject to an Acceptable Use Policy on sustained bandwidth. Properly configured applications won't come near it; it exists to catch runaway clients, not real workloads. On a Dedicated server the policy doesn't apply - the hardware is yours.

Nothing on this page is a bill. Going over an allowance never produces a charge, an overage fee, or a usage invoice. The only consequences are the ones described under If you go over.

Each plan has a sustained-bandwidth allowance per rolling window. These are the published figures:

A dedicated server is single-tenant, so there is no shared region to protect and no acceptable-use bandwidth cap applies. Its practical ceiling is the capacity of the machine you are paying for.

Bandwidth is measured as total transfer in and out, summed across all of your databases on every engine, over rolling 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day windows. Whichever window trips first drives the policy.

The allowance is per account, not per database. A short spike does not trip anything on its own: the windows are rolling, so what matters is sustained transfer, and a burst is averaged into the window it lands in.

Enforcement is graduated, and it is about stopping traffic, not punishing accounts.

• Over the allowance: you get a 24-hour grace period, a warning email, and a banner in your dashboard. If usage is back under the allowance before the grace period ends, nothing else happens and the warning clears itself.
• Still over when grace expires: the databases on your account are stopped.
• More than 5x the allowance: the databases on your account are stopped immediately, with no grace period. At that level the traffic is actively degrading the region for other customers.

While an account is stopped for acceptable use, restarting is disabled. You resume by upgrading to a plan whose allowance covers your usage, or by contacting us once the underlying traffic is fixed. A database that has been stopped for acceptable use does not restart on its own when the rolling window drains.

Nothing is ever deleted. Stopping is not deletion: your databases, their data, and your backups are untouched and stay exactly as they were. Enforcement only takes a database offline.

The overwhelming majority of AUP violations are unintentional - most often a Redis or Valkey client in a tight poll loop re-reading the entire keyspace many times per second, or clients that open connections without closing them. Fixing these typically cuts traffic by 99% or more and improves your application's latency.

Before upgrading, it is worth checking for a polling interval that reads a whole keyspace instead of subscribing to changes, a client that creates a new connection per request and never closes it, a retry loop with no backoff, or a job that re-reads a full table on every tick. If you would like help finding it, reply to the warning email or contact support and we will look at the traffic with you.

We may suspend or terminate accounts used to work around this policy rather than fix the traffic behind it. That includes creating additional accounts to spread usage across allowances, registering a new account after an existing one was stopped for acceptable use, and spreading the same workload across accounts to stay under a per-account allowance.

Signups that correlate with an account previously stopped under this policy may be flagged for review. If you were stopped and want to come back, ask us instead of re-registering: we would much rather help you fix the client and keep the account you already have.

This page covers sustained bandwidth specifically. The broader acceptable-use rules that apply to Layerbase (no attacking or overloading our systems, no malware or stolen data, no bypassing quotas or billing controls, no reselling Layerbase as a competing managed database service) live in the Terms of Service and apply in addition to this policy.

We may adjust these allowances as the platform and its traffic change. If an allowance is reduced, we will make reasonable efforts to notify affected accounts through the dashboard or email before the change takes effect. Increases take effect immediately.

Questions about this policy, or about a specific enforcement action on your account, can be sent to bob@layerbase.com.