Postlad/Pricing
Pricing
Three plans. The free one is a real plan rather than a trial that runs out — no card, no end date. Pick one here; everything each number means is explained further down the page.
Free
$0 forever
- 2 streams
- 100,000 readings a month
- 30 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 12 months
- Share links, embeds and CSV export
Enter your email, click the link we send. That is the whole signup.
Hobby
$6.00 / month
- 8 streams
- 1,500,000 readings a month
- 90 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 24 months
- Value alerts, badge-free embeds, your own web address
Or $60.00 a year. Sign in first — the card page is one click after.
Lab
$29.00 / month
- 20 streams
- 10,000,000 readings a month
- 180 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 60 months
- A lab workspace: invite up to 10 members by email, on the one bill
Or $290.00 a year. Teaching? There is an educator discount below.
A failed payment never deletes your data. Not after a week, not after a month. There are 58 days between a card being declined and anything at all being removed, every step of it is undone by paying, and CSV export works at every point along the way. The whole sequence is written out further down this page.
Every limit, side by side
| Free | Hobby | Lab | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 forever | $6.00 / month | $29.00 / month |
| Paid yearly | — | $60.00 / year | $290.00 / year |
| Streams | 2 | 8 | 20 |
| Lab members | — | — | Invite up to 10 by email; they share the 20 streams, on your one bill |
| Fields per stream | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Readings a month | 100,000 | 1,500,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Fastest write | 1 every 5s | 1 every 5s | 1 every 1s |
| History | 30 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 12 months | 90 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 24 months | 180 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/average to 60 months |
| Share links & public pages | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Embeds | With a small Postlad badge | No badge | No badge |
| Alerts | Stream stopped only | Stream stopped, plus value thresholds | Stream stopped, plus value thresholds |
| Alert rules | 2 | 20 | 100 |
| Shortest gap between alert emails | 30 minutes | 5 minutes | 1 minute |
| Your own web address | Automatic, unguessable | Choose the wordsnew | Choose the wordsnew |
| CSV export | Always | Always | Always |
| CSV import allowance | 2,000,000 readings | 20,000,000 readings | 100,000,000 readings |
Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax, which is added where it applies. Yearly is ten times the monthly price, so two months are free. Payments are handled by our payment provider on their own pages — card details never touch Postlad.
Choose a plan Start free — no card
Early accounts keep this price. Postlad launched in 2026 and these are its first prices. If they go up later, an account that was already subscribed stays on the price it signed up at for as long as the subscription runs — you will not get an email telling you your bill has changed. That is a small promise, and it is the kind that is only worth making in writing.
What every plan gets, including the free one
- Plain HTTP GET writes. One URL from any device that can reach the internet — no SDK, no TLS stack, no token dance.
- 16 fields per stream, twice what ThingSpeak gives you, on every plan.
- A live share link. Paste it in a forum post; a stranger opens a rendered chart with no account and no cookie banner.
- Embeds that follow the host page's theme, on any site, free tier included.
- An email when a stream stops sending. On every plan, free included. You add the rule yourself — nothing is switched on for you and we never email you about your own data unless you asked.
- CSV export, forever. Every reading, on every plan, including from a read-only stream and after a downgrade.
- CSV import. Bring a ThingSpeak channel export with you — it does not count against your monthly readings.
What the free plan actually keeps
Every reading is kept at full detail for 30 days. After that it becomes an hourly minimum, maximum and average, kept for 12 months. Older than that is deleted.
Both halves matter, and they are usually reported as one number by everybody else. The hourly summary is not a sample — it keeps the highest and lowest reading of the hour as well as the average, so a spike at 3 a.m. in March is still visible in December. For comparison, Arduino Cloud's free tier keeps one day and Blynk's keeps a week.
If a payment fails
This is the part of a pricing page that is normally missing, so here it is with dates on it. Nothing is deleted because a card expired.
| When | What happens | Your data |
|---|---|---|
| Days 0–14 | The card is retried. Nothing changes at all — same limits, same streams, same everything. A banner tells you. | Untouched |
| Days 14–28 | Readings keep arriving, at Free-plan rates. Charts, share links and embeds all keep working. Settings go read-only. | Untouched, and retention is frozen |
| Days 28–58 | Streams past the Free limit become read-only. They keep their data, their links and their embeds. CSV export is offered prominently. | Untouched, retention still frozen |
| Day 58 | The account is an ordinary Free account. | Free retention starts applying to older readings |
You are emailed at each step, with the date the next one falls on. Resubscribing at any point restores every stream, every limit and the full retention window — because nothing was destroyed to get there. Cancelling on purpose walks the same path, for the same reason: we would rather keep your readings than be right about a subscription.
Questions people actually ask
Is the free tier a trial?
No. It has no end date and it does not need a card. It is sized so that a term-long student
project finishes on it.
What happens if I go over the monthly readings?
Writes are refused with a plain-text 429 that names the limit and the reset date, so a device
that buffers can hold its readings and send them afterwards. Nothing already stored is
affected, and it resets on the 1st.
Will it email me when my logger dies?
Yes, on every plan including the free one, once you add the rule — it is off until you do. The
check runs once a minute, so a stopped device is noticed within about a minute of the window you
set, and you get a second email when it starts sending again. Watching a reading for a value —
above, below, or outside a range — is checked against every reading as it arrives, and that one
starts at Hobby.
Do you charge per device?
No. A stream is a stream whether one board or four write to it, and there is no seat pricing —
a classroom on Lab is one bill.
Buying for a research group or a class?
The Lab plan is a shared workspace. The account that buys it invites members by email — up to
10 of them — and each member signs in as themselves and gets Lab limits on that one bill, with
no card of their own. The whole lab shares the plan's 20 streams, and any stream or board can
be opened to the lab without being made public.
Are you going to disappear like the others did?
Maybe; every platform in that graveyard also said no. What we can do instead of promising is
make leaving cheap: CSV export works on every plan at any time with no account needed for a
public stream, and if Postlad ever shuts down, the notice period and a full export come first.
Teaching a class?
There is a 40% educator discount on Lab. Write to
hello@postlad.com from your institution's address and
we will send you the code.
Still deciding?
The free account takes about a minute and needs no card, and every limit on this page is shown on your own account page as you use it. Start there — the plans are not going anywhere.