Plans, data transfer and what you pay for
What annual access covers, how data transfer is measured and shared across your Macs, and why renewal is a deliberate act rather than a subscription.
What the annual plan includes
An account receives one 7-day trial with 1 GB of public data transfer. Adding another Mac does not start another trial. Paid access is $18 per Mac for one year, renewed manually, not an automatically renewing subscription.
Each eligible paid Mac includes 10 GB per UTC calendar month, pooled across your account. Included monthly data does not roll over. A $10 top-up adds 200 GB of prepaid data and requires an active paid Mac.
What counts as data transfer
Customer workload traffic admitted between the relay and Linux counts in both directions. The meter includes packet headers and retransmissions seen at that boundary, not just the files or messages you send. It does not claim to match the VPS provider’s physical-network bill. One GB means 1,000,000,000 bytes.
How streams and partial responses are counted
WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE) and other streams are counted continuously while open. Binary messages, fragments and partial responses do not require a finished request to be counted. Packets rejected by our quota are not billed; admitted traffic may still fail to arrive because of a later network or application error.
What is not metered, and the speed cap
Normal connections started by Linux to the Internet use your own connection, rather than MacServe’s public relay. The account has a shared 10 Mbps cap in each direction, including when it has multiple Macs. Tunnel encryption/keepalives and separate platform-control traffic are not added to customer usage.
Relay-generated parked and error pages do not cross the VM’s metered tunnel. They are platform responses, not customer uploads or hosted workloads; parked-page requests have separate rate protection.
When the number you see updates
The relay normally saves snapshots every second and settles usage about every ten seconds. The panel refresh adds a short delay; check the usage timestamp if it looks stale. A temporary reservation can reduce available data before final usage appears. Unused reserved data returns after settlement. If a server failure loses unsaved counters, access stays paused for reconciliation rather than inventing an exact total.
A checkout page is not a confirmation
A successful checkout page is not payment confirmation: access changes only after the server verifies the provider’s payment event.
When access stops, and what survives
If access expires or data runs out, public connections are restricted. Your Linux VM and files remain on your Mac, and the local terminal is still available. Renew or add eligible data in Billing & usage.
Sandbox payments are tests, not real charges. Production billing is a separate launch step. Review the environment and amount on checkout; never provide payment details to an AI agent in chat.