Pricing

Hypothesis: Seven Quarters and Two Dimes.

That's it (we think). We're still in early development stages, so part of what we're evaluating now is how the costs stack up under normal usage. It could change, but our hypothesis now is that $1.95/month covers storage and hosting costs, payment processor fees, and still leaves enough for the conductor to keep this train moving.

For now, nobody pays a dime (or two dimes and seven quarters) during closed trial and open beta phases. If that's you, thanks for helping us learn and build the best product we can.

now

Closed trial

A handful of people, invited by hand. No charge, no card, no countdown. This part is about features and feedback.

free
next

Limited open beta

A fixed number of seats, open to anyone with an agent, still free. It is also how we find out what running this actually costs, one account at a time.

free, while seats last
later

General availability

Hosted and looked after, for people who would rather not run a server themselves.

one dollar ninety-five

Where the money goes

The goal is to make this accessible. You can run it yourself if you want to, and the code will always be there for that. It is also cheap enough that you might not want to. Let us carry the pager. 😉

If you stop paying

Things happen. Cards expire, crises arise, and sometimes funds are just tight. Your data will be retained. We'll send reminders in case the lapse was unintentional, and you can still export and download your data for free, even if your account has lapsed. Deletion is 1 year from account lapse, or as soon as you tell us to clear it, whichever comes first.

Is it free right now?

Yes. The closed trial and beta phases cost nothing and require no card on file.

How is that enough?

Traceroute isn't a VC-backed startup with an expected infinite growth curve or investors to please. It's the product of a software engineer who decided to treat his health like an engineering problem (and maybe got a little carried away with it). The goal isn't to make anyone rich. It just needs to make enough money to reserve a spot on an engineer's dance card so that people can keep using it to get healthy.

Will the price go up?

Not if it can be helped. An important part of the origin story for Traceroute is a belief that achieving health goals shouldn't be something that only the wealthy and famous can access — that it's something we can all do without dedicated teams of specialists. Higher prices directly compete with that vision of accessibility. The practical lower bound for the price is the cost of operations and overhead. That's what we're shooting for with this project.

Can I run it myself instead?

Absolutely. Traceroute is source-available and free for personal use if you run it yourself. It's still on the roadmap at this point, but the goal is to provide parallel versioned artifacts for self hosting. Taking our code and standing up a rival company/product would be supremely uncool, so the license prohibits that, but for personal use? Do it. Get healthy. Send success stories. They won't buy pizza and beer, but they still make us feel good.

Do you sell my data, or show me ads?

In case you haven't caught the vibe by now, the answer to that question is an emphatic "Hell no." The only way your data gets used is in improving this product, with your consent. If you opt to share your data publicly, we recommend you do so under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which lets people use it for research and other non-commercial purposes, but not to sell it or build a business on it.

What if the project ends?

That would be a huge bummer, but anything is possible. You could expect lots of communication in that case, including how to export your data, and the option to continue to self-host.

Questions about any of this go straight to the developer — ask directly. See where each stage sits on the roadmap.