Billing and plans

Quiet Guard bills by event volume, per team. Projects are unlimited on every plan, so you pay for the data your applications send. The number of people who can read it, the seats, follows the plan.

Everything described here is on the Billing page of your dashboard, under Settings. Only the team owner can subscribe or change plan; the other members see the same figures without the buttons.

The plans

Seats count everybody in the team, the owner included, which is why Free is a single seat: you. The Team members page shows the count against the allowance, and an address cannot be added, nor an invitation sent, once every seat is taken.

A plan with fewer seats than the team has members never removes anybody. If you move down to a plan that seats three while five people are in the team, all five keep working exactly as before; what stops is growth, so no new member can be added and a pending invitation is refused when its guest opens the link. That invitation stays valid rather than being consumed, so removing a member or moving back up makes the same link work. Bringing the team down to size, if you want to, is yours to do from the Team members page.

Every plan includes exception tracking, heartbeats, uptime monitoring with its public status page, alerting by email and dependency vulnerability scanning. Indie and Studio add application logs, Slack and webhook alerts, the GitHub integration, encrypted storage and encrypted backups. Each plan card on the Billing page lists what it includes.

Prices exclude VAT. Quiet Guard is sold to businesses, and the applicable tax is added at checkout according to your country and your tax status. The yearly price is ten times the monthly one, which makes two months free; the cards carry a monthly / yearly switch.

During the closed beta

Quiet Guard is in closed beta, and while it lasts the plans above are not for sale.

• Every team is on the Beta plan, at no cost, until the date written on the banner at the top of your Billing page. That plan carries a one million event monthly quota, one year of retention, 20 GB of backup storage and every feature.
• Nothing can be bought. Prices stay on screen, because the reaction to them is one of the things being tested, but the cards read "Included in the beta" instead of offering a button.
• No card is asked for, no free trial runs alongside, and nothing is charged.

The date on the banner is your team's own, not a global one, and it can be extended. Ask before it passes rather than after. It also falls a week after the beta itself closes: the announcement of the end and the day it bites are deliberately not the same day.

On the day it does pass, and unless you have subscribed by then, your team returns to the Free plan: 10,000 events a month and a seven day retention window. Everything older than seven days is deleted the following night, and deleted data cannot be brought back. If that history matters, subscribe or take what you need out before the date.

Events and your monthly quota

An event is one stored exception occurrence or one stored log line. The two count the same, and they count per team across all your projects, for the calendar month. The counter starts again on the first of each month.

The quota is soft on purpose:

• up to the quota, everything is stored;
• a grace margin of 10 % above it is still stored;
• past that, surplus events are not stored. Your application receives no error, the ingestion endpoint keeps answering normally and tells the client how many entries were kept, and nothing extra is billed.

A traffic spike therefore costs you some visibility until the end of the month, never a failed request in production and never an invoice you did not expect.

The team owner is emailed when the team reaches 80 % then 100 % of the quota, so the ceiling is never a surprise.

The Billing page shows the month's counter against the quota, how many events were not stored, an end of month projection at the current pace with the date the quota would be reached, and a breakdown of the month's events per project. That breakdown is counted at ingestion, so events that were dropped or already deleted can make it differ slightly from the counter above it.

Retention: how long data is kept

Each plan keeps exceptions and logs for its own window: seven days on Free, thirty on Indie, ninety on Studio. Older occurrences and log lines are deleted every night, and an issue whose last occurrence has fallen outside the window goes with them.

Uptime probe history is separate and keeps a fixed seven days on every plan, which is the window the latency chart and the status page read.

Retention always follows the plan in effect today. Moving to a shorter window means the next night's clean-up applies that window, and what it deletes is not recoverable.

Exporting your data

A team owner can ask for a copy of everything this team holds, at any time, from Team settings. Nothing to request by email, nobody to wait for.

The export is built in the background. It stays on our servers, and the person who asked for it receives an email carrying a private download link. It is a ZIP archive holding one CSV file per table: the team itself, its members and pending invitations, its projects, issues, occurrences, log lines, dependencies, vulnerability findings, heartbeats, alert channels, and the catalogue of the encrypted vault. A README.txt inside explains every file and what the archive leaves out.

Three things it deliberately does not carry:

It exports what you can still see, which is what the retention window above has not deleted. Nothing is brought back for an export.

The archive is never attached to the email, whatever its size. Your monitoring data is hosted in France and our transactional email leaves from Switzerland, so an attachment would send the whole team's data out of the European Union to sit in a mailbox, which the processing agreement says does not happen. The link is valid for seven days and asks you to sign in, and it checks that you are still a member of the team; after that the archive is deleted from our servers and you can ask for a fresh one. One export per team per hour.

The free trial

Outside the beta, a new team starts with a fourteen day free trial of the most complete paid plan, without encrypted backups. No card is asked for.

The Billing page and the dashboard show the countdown, and the owner receives a single reminder email a few days before the end. Nothing is charged when the trial finishes: the team simply moves to the Free plan, with Free's quota and Free's retention window. Subscribing before that date keeps the features running without a break.

Subscribing to a plan

Subscription is the team owner's, from the plan cards on the Billing page.

1. Choose monthly or yearly on the switch above the cards.
2. Click Subscribe on the plan you want.
3. On a first purchase, tick the box accepting the terms of sale, the terms of use and the privacy policy. What was accepted, by whom and when is recorded for your team.
4. Stripe's hosted checkout page opens. Card details are entered there and never reach Quiet Guard.

Discount codes go in the promotion code field on that Stripe page.

Back from checkout, the page confirms the payment; the plan activates as soon as Stripe confirms it, which usually takes a few seconds.

Changing plan

While a subscription is running, choosing another plan changes the price on the existing subscription rather than opening a second one, so a team is never billed twice. Stripe prorates the difference on the next invoice: an upgrade mid-month is charged for the days that remain, a downgrade credits them.

The new quota applies immediately. So does the new retention window, which is worth a thought before a downgrade: the shorter window takes effect the same night.

Cancelling

Manage subscription and payment method on the Billing page opens Stripe's customer portal. Cards, billing address and cancellation live there.

A cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid for, never on the spot. Until that date the team keeps its plan in full; after it, the team returns to the Free plan. The remaining days are not refunded, and nothing is charged again.

If a payment fails

A failed charge does not close your account. Stripe retries on its own schedule, and during that window the Billing page reads "Service suspended, payment outstanding":

• everything already collected stays readable, and nothing is deleted;
• ingestion, alerts and probes are paused, so new exceptions and logs are not stored while it lasts.

Updating the payment method in the customer portal switches everything back on. If Stripe gives up, the subscription stops granting the plan and the team lands on Free, where ingestion resumes under Free's quota.

Invoices

Every invoice is listed on the Billing page: date, status, total and a link to Stripe's own copy, which is the document to give your accountant. The same history is available in the customer portal.

Invoices are issued to the team, with the business identifier collected when the team was created. VAT is applied by Stripe according to your country and your tax status.

Backup storage

On the plans that include encrypted backups, the Billing page carries a Backup storage section: the space used against your plan's allowance, broken down per project, largest first.

Sizes are counted in base 1000 units, so a 2 GB allowance is 2,000,000,000 bytes. Backups have their own allowance and never count toward the event quota. An upload that would exceed the allowance is refused, and nothing already stored is touched: delete an archive you no longer need, or move to a plan with more room.

When paid access ends

A subscription that ends, a cancellation that reaches its date and a complimentary access that lapses all lead to the same place: the team goes back to the Free plan.

Nothing is deleted at that moment. Your account, your teams, your projects and your API keys are untouched, and exception tracking, heartbeats, uptime monitoring and vulnerability scanning keep working. Everybody in the team keeps their access, even where the team is larger than the Free seat. What changes is everything the Free plan does not carry. Log ingestion is refused, so new log lines stop arriving while exceptions keep being collected. Slack and webhook alert channels stop firing, and email channels take over on their own. The GitHub section of a project's settings becomes an upsell and the scheduled synchronisation skips the project, though everything already synchronised stays visible. No member can be added while the team is at or above the Free seat. The Backups area is no longer available and no new backup can be uploaded, though the archives already stored are kept and become reachable again on a plan that includes them. Content sealed by encrypted storage before the change stays readable with your passphrase, and new content is no longer sealed.

The change that deserves attention is retention. Free keeps seven days, so the night after the plan changes, everything older than that is deleted for good. Subscribing again restores the longer window for what comes next, not for what has already gone.

Closing your account

Closing a team is the team owner's, from Team settings under Settings, at the bottom of the page. It is a different act from cancelling a subscription: cancelling keeps the account and drops it to Free, closing deletes it.

The button opens a confirmation asking you to type the team's URL identifier, the one shown in the field above it. That is deliberate: this deletion has no undo once its date has passed, and a plain confirm button is one misplaced click.

When it takes effect

A closure is scheduled, never immediate. The date is the end of what your team has already committed to, and never sooner than seven days:

• a running subscription: the end of the period you have paid for. The subscription is stopped at that period end on the way out, so nothing renews and you are not charged for a period you will not use;
• a complimentary access, the beta included: the date that access runs to. A complimentary access granted with no end date commits to nothing, so it falls back to the seven days below;
• a Free plan or a trial, which commit to nothing: seven days from your request.

The seven days are a floor, not a ceiling. They buy the two things an instant deletion would not: time to change your mind, and time to take a copy of what you want to keep.

The owner receives a confirmation email naming the date and what goes with it. The date is also on the Billing page and on the team settings page until it arrives.

Calling it off

Keep this team on either of those two pages cancels the closure, at any point until the date. Nothing is deleted and the team carries on.

One thing it does not do: a subscription that was stopped when the closure was scheduled is not restarted. That instruction went to Stripe. Subscribe again from the Billing page if you want it back.

What is deleted

On the day, everything the team holds goes: its projects and with them their issues, exception occurrences, log lines, vulnerability findings, dependency snapshots, synchronised GitHub history, heartbeats, uptime samples and public status pages; every encrypted backup archive, the ciphertext included, which nobody can read anyway; the API keys, the alert channels, the pending invitations, the team logo and the usage counters. The members are detached and receive nothing further about the team. The owner is emailed as it happens.

Nothing is restorable. Only what the law requires us to keep is kept, invoices among them, and only for the length of that obligation.

Deleting your own account

Your account is separate from the teams you belong to, and My account carries its own Delete my account. It removes your account, your name, your address and your notifications, and takes you out of every team you belong to. Those teams and their data stay where they are.

You cannot delete your account while you own a team: the team is the party the contract binds, and an owner-less team would be one nobody could ever close. The page names the teams to close first.