Billing & Plans

How billing works#

Signing up runs through Stripe Checkout. Once you're on a plan, you can switch between Starter and Pro right from the Billing tab - "Upgrade to Pro" / "Switch to Starter" - without leaving the app. The switch retargets your existing subscription in place (it never creates a second one), takes effect immediately, keeps any trial in progress, and confirms the projected cost first. Canceling, updating a payment method, and viewing invoice history still happen in a self-serve Stripe Customer Portal, available to the org owner (which also offers the same plan switch as a fallback). See Data Portability & Offboarding for exactly what happens to your data if you cancel.

One thing neither the app nor the portal lets you set directly: seat quantity. Seat count is derived from live org membership, not a number you type - you change your seat count by adding or removing people in the Team tab, and your billed seats follow automatically, reconciled daily. Editing a seat count by hand would just get overwritten by the next reconcile sweep, so that control isn't exposed anywhere; the Billing tab links you to Team instead.

Both plans carry the same 7-day free trial. Your card is collected upfront at signup, and the first charge happens on day 7.

Plans#

Bandwidth is unlimited and free on every plan, for both cloud and P2P transfer - there's no egress metering anywhere in the product. Self-hosted seed/NAS nodes require Pro or above; see Self-Hosted Seed Nodes for setup.

Need more than Pro's limits - unbounded external collaborators, a custom seat arrangement, or different billing terms? Enterprise plans are available; contact us.

Overage rates#

Storage that exceeds your plan's included allowance is billed at $4/100 GiB on Pro and $5/100 GiB on Starter. External collaborators beyond your plan's included allowance are billed at $1/month per collaborator, up to the 3x hard ceiling described below.

Enforcement#

Quota enforcement is always on. There's no setting to disable it and no feature flag gating it off - it's a structural part of the product, not an opt-in.

Storage, seats, and external collaborators are enforced differently, on purpose:

• Seats have a real hard ceiling on Starter (5 seats) - you can't exceed it. Pro has no seat ceiling, just a 5-seat minimum billed.
• Storage and external collaborators both bill metered overage before hard-blocking, rather than blocking right at the included amount: storage hard-blocks at 3x the included allowance (or included + 1 GiB on a plan that doesn't meter storage overage), and external collaborators hard-block at 3x the included per-seat allowance.

The reasoning: the pricing page sells metered overage as a real capability for both dimensions, so hard-blocking the moment you cross the included allowance would refuse to sell what's advertised. The backstop exists to catch runaway or abusive usage, not to cap normal overage billing.

Downgrading with too many seats#

The in-app "Switch to Starter" is blocked while you have more members than Starter's 5-seat cap allows - the button is disabled and tells you how many members to remove first (Starter can't keep more than 5 seats). Remove members in the Team tab, then switch.

The Stripe Portal path is more permissive: a Pro→Starter switch there is not blocked even when you're over cap, and Swarmfile does not auto-remove anyone to make it fit. Instead, the org owner gets a quota_warnings banner immediately - not on a delay - so you can see the overflow and act on it (remove members, or switch back) before it becomes a problem.

Plan-gated features#

A handful of admin features are Pro+ only: SSO, SCIM/LDAP sync, folder ACLs with Windows DACL projection, and audit-log export. These are enforced server-side with a real 402 rejection if you try to configure them on a plan that doesn't include them - not just hidden behind UI. Downgrading never disables something you've already configured; it only blocks configuring something new.

For the details on those features themselves, see Identity and Permissions.

Usage visibility#

Plan standing, current usage, and your org's resolved entitlement set are visible to any org member, not just the owner. See Organizations, Projects & Members for where that lives.