Frequently Asked Questions

The basics

What is stored.ge? S3-compatible object storage. One endpoint, one API, and an engine that routes your data across enterprise S3 (hot) and tape libraries (cold) based on access patterns. Anything that speaks S3 works: aws-cli, rclone, restic, boto3, JuiceFS, Cyberduck.

What's the endpoint and region? Endpoint https://stored.ge, region us-east-1, path-style addressing. See Getting Started.

Is there a free tier? Yes — 5 GB free, no credit card. Enough to test every feature end to end.

Where do I get my keys? They're shown once at signup. Need another? Dashboard → API Keys → Generate Key — the secret is shown once; copy it then.

Pricing

How much does it cost?

Every tier is sold as a quota. You pick a size in whole TB (any size), pay the flat per-TB rate, and resize up or down whenever you like (prorated). The quota is a hard cap — a write past it returns a clear quota error until you resize — so the bill never moves on its own: no meters, no overage charges.

No API/request fees, ever. No retrieval fees. No minimum storage duration on Standard; Vault has a 30-day per-object minimum (a third of Wasabi's 90). Egress is free up to 0.5× your quota each month; beyond that throughput is throttled rather than billed — no surprise egress bills. Vault restores are free up to 1× your quota each month — test your restores monthly at no cost — and restores beyond that are queued, never billed.

What stays hot on Standard? About 15% of your quota lives on hot storage. Data idle for 14+ days moves to tape automatically; reading it brings it back hot within minutes (and it stays hot for 7 days). Need specific data to never demote? The pin-hot add-on is $3/TB/mo for the pinned amount.

How is $4.49/TB sustainable? Is this VC-subsidized? No. The tiering math alone is a real margin: at full fill, ~15% on hot storage and ~85% on tape blends our cost to about $1.94/TB against $4.49 revenue. On top of that, deduplication (backup workloads dedupe 30–50%) and zstd compression on every chunk are upside — your quota counts the bytes you see (logical), the savings are ours; that's how the price works, not a fee you pay. If you store incompressible, unique, constantly-hot data, pin it hot ($3/TB/mo) or wait for the Performance tier after launch.

Will my price change at renewal? No renewal-price roulette. The rate you sign up at is the rate you pay.

Trust & reliability (the honest part)

Do you have an SLA? Not a contractual one yet — we won't sell one we can't back. Target is 99.5%+, there's a public status page, and incident reports are written by a human. Contractual SLA credits ship when the second site comes online.

Isn't a single server a single point of failure? For the control plane, yes — the API runs on one dedicated box (HA-proxied, monitored, daily off-site DB backups, tested restores). Your data is not on that box — it lives on enterprise S3 and tape providers. If the server dies, your data is intact and the control plane restores from backup (target: under an hour). A hot standby in a second city is the first thing new revenue buys.

What if you disappear? / bus factor of one? Three answers: (1) It's standard S3 — rclone sync your data out anytime, egress is never billed (a full exit past your monthly allowance is throttled, not charged), there's no proprietary format and no lock-in. (2) Your data lives on established providers that don't depend on us. (3) The core engine is open source. Documented wind-down commitment: minimum 60 days' notice and free unlimited egress before any shutdown.

Should I trust a brand-new provider with my only copy? No — follow 3-2-1. We should be your second or third copy, not your only one. That's true of any provider, including the big ones. 30-day full refund, no questions.

Technical

How fast is it? ~320 MB/s sustained multipart upload from a datacenter host; from home you'll saturate your uplink first. Sub-1ms HEAD/metadata (served from cache). Range-GET passthrough for video seeking and partial restores.

How does encryption work? Encrypted at rest by default (SSE-S3). Want to hold your own keys? Use SSE-C, or client-side encryption (rclone crypt works great). Client-side encryption disables dedup on that data — everything else still works.

A privacy note on deduplication: Dedup runs over encrypted chunks via convergent encryption (key derived from content hash). Known limitation: someone who already possesses an exact file could confirm it exists in the store. If that's in your threat model, use SSE-C or client-side encryption and you keep dedup on everything else.

Cold data retrieval — is it instant? Hot data is <50ms. Data aged to tape spools to cache on first read — seconds to a couple of minutes for first byte, longer for multi-TB restores. Need specific data hot forever? The pin-hot add-on ($3/TB/mo) keeps it from ever demoting; a full always-hot Performance tier launches after October 31.

Which S3 features are supported? Multipart, versioning, Object Lock (governance + compliance/WORM), presigned URLs, CORS, range + conditional requests, tagging, batch delete, ListObjectsV2, scoped API keys (per-bucket, IP allowlist, expiry), and STS temporary credentials.

Support

How do I get help? Email support@stored.ge — founder-direct, target response under 4 hours. For abuse reports, see /abuse.