Legal
Self-serve use of CK Spatial Fabric is prepaid and metered: you fund a Wallet and pay for what you use, the way network connectivity is billed — a reserved rate you may choose to hold, plus metered volume:
Each is a reservation — CK keeps capacity in service for you, and you pay for it, whether or not you use it. A reservation is a floor, not a ceiling: it guarantees a minimum that is yours, and does not limit how much of the Service you may use. Reserving one dimension does not reserve the other.
A reservation buys capacity, not volume. The reservation fee is charged in addition to metered usage and includes no data volume of its own: every byte and operation is metered on the same terms whether or not you hold a reservation, and the free allowances below apply identically either way. Reserving 5 MB/s does not make the first 5 MB/s free. Reserved Throughput is a self-serve Rate Card line, not an enterprise item.
The Free Tier below sets monthly allowances and requires no Reserved Throughput.
1.1 Other Usage Metrics. Beside data transfer, CK meters and charges four further kinds of usage under API ToS Section 4.3(c), each published on the Rate Card with its own rate and Free Tier allowance: compute time, measured in CPU-hours and pooled across everything the Service runs on your behalf (GraphQL resolvers, automations and compute modules); stored data, measured as data held over time (GB-month); data written by compute modules, measured in GB of data the Service writes to durable storage when an App's compute modules save their state; and stored input logs, measured as the recorded bytes of an App's Input Log (API ToS Section 6.4a) held over time (GB-month). Each recorded input counts at its record size, a fixed header plus the message, before any compression or replication, and the API reports that size for every recorded input so you can add it up yourself. Each recorded byte is charged for the input-log retention period published on the Rate Card and no longer, so a gigabyte recorded is charged as a gigabyte held for that period: at a 7-day retention, 168 GB-hours, or 0.23 GB-month. Counts are not priced. A message, a datagram, an API operation, a notification or a row written is paid for by the bytes it moves or writes and the compute it takes, never by being counted; the Rate Card carries no per-message, per-operation, per-notification or per-row rate.
1.2 When usage is charged. Every Usage Metric is aggregated over its reset interval (currently monthly for every Free Tier allowance), priced at its unit rate (band by band, where it has Volume Bands — Section 5.1), rounded up to the next whole cent once for the interval, and charged to your Wallet as the interval's total crosses each cent — within about a minute of the usage arriving. Your account shows an hourly itemisation of what was used and what was charged during each hour; the itemisation is a statement of charges already made, not a separate charge.
2.1 Billed Volume. For metered billing, Aggregate Data Volume means the total data the Service delivers to your clients (egress / "data downloaded") during the billing period, aggregated across all your sessions and clients.
2.2 Included. Data the Service transmits to your clients — state, replication, and fan-out traffic delivered to subscribers — measured at the network interface. Billed Volume is therefore the size of the frames actually placed on the wire, which includes the transport and network headers each frame carries (Ethernet, IP, and UDP or TCP). This is the same basis on which network capacity is provisioned and billed to CK.
2.3 Excluded. (a) Ingress — data your clients send to the Service — is not part of Aggregate Data Volume; (b) retransmissions of frames already counted; and (c) control-plane and keepalive traffic.
Two clarifications on (a). Aggregate Data Volume is an egress measure, and nothing your clients upload is counted toward it or toward its Free Tier allowance. Separately, CK meters and charges inbound data as its own Usage Metric under API ToS Section 4.3(c): Aggregate Data Ingress, the cumulative volume of data your clients send to the Service over the billing period, is published on the Rate Card with its own rate and its own Free Tier allowance (Section 3), and is measured on the same network-interface basis as Section 2.2 (and, for traffic through an intermediary, on the same payload basis as Section 2.3.1). Each byte is counted once, in the direction it travelled: a byte is either egress or ingress, and no byte is charged under more than one Usage Metric.
2.3.1 Where the payload differs from the frame. For traffic CK delivers over its own network interfaces, Billed Volume is the frame as described in Section 2.2. For traffic delivered through an intermediary CK does not measure at the interface — for example HTTPS responses served through a load balancer — CK measures the application payload and does not add an estimate for the framing beneath it. That measurement is lower than the wire figure, never higher.
2.4 Compression. Billed Volume is measured after any compression the Service applies — i.e., the bytes actually sent, not the pre-compression size.
2.5 Units. Volume is measured in decimal units, consistent with carrier and ISP billing: 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. (This is decimal GB, not binary GiB.)
2.6 Measurement Authority. CK's measurement of Billed Volume is final and binding absent manifest error, per API ToS Section 4.3.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Free app slots | 3 per Organization — each free app is a separate allowance |
| Included Aggregate Data Volume | 5 GB per reset interval (currently monthly), per free app |
| Included Aggregate Data Ingress | 5 GB per reset interval (currently monthly), per free app |
| Included compute | 20 CPU-hours per reset interval (currently monthly), per free app, pooled across GraphQL resolvers, automations and compute modules |
| Included stored data | 1 GB held for the reset interval (1 GB-month), per free app |
| Stored input logs | None; Input Logs are recorded only for an App whose Organization turns on replay logging, which requires a funded Wallet unless the Organization is exempt from billing, and are charged from the first byte at the Rate Card rate |
| Writes by compute modules | 1 GB of data written per reset interval (currently monthly), per App; data written beyond the allowance is charged at the Rate Card rate; rows written are not charged |
| Data Transfer Rate | Best-effort on the Public (shared) Environment; no Reserved Capacity; soft-capped at ~1 MB/s per free app. The cap applies to the Free Tier only: once a Wallet is funded and metered usage is enabled, CK does not rate-limit your egress, and your spend is bounded by the caps you set rather than by a throughput ceiling |
| Intended use | A casually-played game of roughly 4 players per free app (sizing basis in Section 4); the enforced limits are the monthly allowances published on the Rate Card — 5 GB of volume, 5 GB of ingress, 20 CPU-hours, 1 GB-month of storage — not a player count |
| App charges | None — CK does not charge for apps, free or paid; there is no per-app or per-seat fee |
| Environment | Public (shared), multi-tenant, no availability or capacity guarantee |
| Reset | Set by CK (currently monthly); unused volume does not roll over |
| Enforcement | Usage evaluated continuously (about once a minute) against each allowance's reset interval; on exhaustion, the Service refuses the app's traffic with a typed denial (`free_allowance` for a spent allowance, `insufficient_funds` for an unfunded Wallet) until the interval resets or the Wallet is funded; you are notified as you approach and reach the limit |
| Wallet / First Day Reserve | Not required — the Free Tier carries no reservation |
3.1 What happens at the limit. The Free Tier is a hard allowance, not a trial that starts charging automatically. CK evaluates your usage continuously, about once a minute; once you exhaust an allowance for the current reset interval, the Service stops serving your app's traffic and refuses requests with a typed denial — `free_allowance` when an allowance is spent, `insufficient_funds` when the volume allowance is spent and no Wallet covers the overage — until the interval resets or a Wallet is funded. CK notifies you as you approach and when you reach the limit. The reset interval — hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly — is set by CK and may be adjusted; the current interval is published on this Rate Card. You can lift the limit at any time by funding a Wallet and opting into metered usage, in which case volume beyond the free allowance is drawn from your Wallet at the rates published elsewhere on the Rate Card. Free stays free unless you choose to pay.
3.2 No Reserved Capacity on the Free Tier. The Free Tier runs on shared best-effort capacity. To have capacity provisioned and held for you, fund a Wallet and buy a reservation in either dimension from your account at the published rate under API ToS Section 4.3(a). Reserved Throughput is available on the shared (Public) Environment and does not require a Private Environment; dedicated Private Environments are by Enterprise Agreement only (Section 1).
3.3 Apps, Environments, and Paid Apps. An App is your product or project; an Environment is the isolated Game API, replication, and database stack an App runs on. They are distinct, and an Organization may create an unlimited number of Apps. Each Organization includes three free app slots. A free App runs on a shared (Public) Environment with its own 5 GB allowance, independent of your other Apps. CK does not charge for Apps themselves. A paid App is one you have funded beyond the free rate; it runs on the shared (Public) Environment and incurs only Reserved Throughput (if you hold any) and metered usage Fees under API ToS Section 4.3, with no separate app or seat fee. Promoting a free App to a paid App returns the free slot, so an Organization always has up to three free apps available in addition to any number of paid apps. The number of paid apps is unlimited. Dedicated (Private) Environments are available only under an Enterprise Agreement — contact hello@crowdedkingdoms.com.
The Free Tier is sized to cover a 4-player game played casually. For a full-mesh session where every player sees every other player, egress scales as N × (N−1) × f × b bytes/sec, where N = players, f = state updates/sec, b = payload bytes per update. For N = 4 that is 12 × f × b.
| Profile | f (Hz) | b (bytes) | Egress / hour | ~30 hr/mo | ~60 hr/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light | 10 | 40 | ~17 MB | ~0.5 GB | ~1.0 GB |
| Typical | 15 | 60 | ~39 MB | ~1.2 GB | ~2.3 GB |
| Busy | 20 | 100 | ~86 MB | ~2.6 GB | ~5.2 GB |
A casually-played 4-player game lands in the low single-digit GB/month range, so 5 GB covers typical-to-busy play with headroom. Delta compression (sending only what changed) stretches this substantially; higher tick rates shrink it.
*These figures show egress; ingress for the same session is the players' own input (a small fraction of egress) and is metered separately as Aggregate Data Ingress. Real values depend on your actual tick rate, snapshot/delta size, and compression. This sizing is illustrative only and is not a performance or cost guarantee. The cost estimator on the Pricing page applies the Rate Card to the actors, update rate, payload, spatial reach, compute and storage you describe; it is an estimate on the same basis and is likewise not a quote.*
Usage beyond the Free Tier is billed at CK's then-current paid rates for Reserved Throughput, Aggregate Data Volume, Aggregate Data Ingress, compute time, stored data, stored input logs, and the other Usage Metrics published on the Rate Card, subject to change under the API ToS. Dedicated Private Environments and custom SLAs are priced under the Enterprise Agreement that provides them. Charges are made as described in Section 1.2. Funding a Wallet and opting into metered usage is required before any paid usage begins. If your applicable rates are unclear, contact hello@crowdedkingdoms.com.
5.1 Volume Bands. The Rate Card may publish a Usage Metric's unit rate as Volume Bands (API ToS Section 4.1): consecutive ranges of an App's usage of that Usage Metric over its reset interval, each with its own unit rate. Aggregate Data Volume is currently priced in Volume Bands; every other Usage Metric has a single unit rate. Volume Bands work as follows:
The bands, their edges and their rates are published on the Rate Card at crowdedkingdoms.com/pricing and in your account, and are the same for every Organization. They are part of the one Rate Card, not a negotiated discount, and an Enterprise Agreement does not change them.
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