Postlad/Terms

Terms

What a Postlad account is, what the paid plans add, what happens when a payment fails or you decide to stop, and what this product does not claim to be. Written to be read once, in full, in about four minutes.

Last updated 2026-08-11. Questions, and anything that looks wrong on your bill: hello@postlad.com, which reaches a person.

1. What an account is

A place to send readings to, and pages that draw them. You create one with an email address; there is no password, no card and no sales call. The free plan is a plan and not a trial — it has no end date, and it is sized so that a term-long student project finishes on it.

Using Postlad means using it as a person or an organisation that can enter an agreement. It is not intended for children.

2. What you pay

Free is $0 forever. Hobby is $6.00 a month or $60.00 a year. Lab is $29.00 a month or $290.00 a year. 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. There is a 40% educator discount on Lab — write from an institution's address and we will send the code.

Payment is taken by our payment provider on its own pages. Card details never touch Postlad. A subscription renews on its own until you stop it.

The price you signed up at is the price you keep. If prices go up later, an account that was already subscribed stays on the price it signed up at for as long as the subscription runs.

3. What the plans actually differ on

Streams (2 / 8 / 20), readings a month (100,000 / 1,500,000 / 10,000,000), the fastest write accepted (one every 5s, 5s, 1s), how long readings are kept, whether an embed carries a small Postlad badge, and whether you choose the words in a stream's web address. Sixteen fields per stream, share links, public pages, embeds, CSV export and CSV import are on every plan including the free one. The full table is on the pricing page.

Going over a limit does not cost you money and does not delete anything. Writes past the monthly cap 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. Everything already stored is untouched, and the count resets on the 1st.

4. Your data is yours

You keep every right you had in what you send. Postlad stores it, draws it and gives it back; it does not claim ownership of it, does not sell it, and does not use it to train anything.

CSV export works on every plan, at any time — including from a stream that has gone read-only and after a downgrade — and it needs no request and no account for a public stream. That is the escape hatch, and it is deliberately not a setting we can change our minds about.

What you make public is your decision and your responsibility. Every stream and board starts private. Don't publish readings you are not allowed to publish, and don't publish your write key — it is the credential that lets anything write to your stream, and anyone holding it can. Rotating a key is immediate.

5. If a payment fails

Nothing is deleted because a card expired. 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.

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.

6. Cancelling, and refunds

Cancel from the billing portal, reached from your account page, at any time and without asking anybody. The subscription runs to the end of the period you have already paid for and is not renewed. Nothing is deleted on that date: the account becomes a Free account and keeps everything, and resubscribing before or after puts the limits back. Cancelling on purpose then walks the same ladder as §5, for the same reason — we would rather keep your readings than be right about a subscription.

Cancelling stops the next charge rather than refunding the last one, and payments already taken are not automatically refunded. The reason that is a fair position is the reason it is stated so plainly: the free plan is a real plan, it needs no card, and every limit that differs is published on the pricing page before you pay — so there is no version of "it turned out not to be what I expected" that a week on the free plan would not have answered.

What is not covered by that. If you were charged twice, charged after cancelling, or charged and the plan never activated, write to hello@postlad.com and it goes back. A charge with no working product behind it is not a sale we intend to keep.

7. What Postlad is, and is not

It is a data logger and a chart. It is not a monitoring or alerting system — there are no alerts in the product today, so nothing here should be relied on to tell you that a reading crossed a threshold. Do not use it as the only record of something you cannot afford to lose, and do not put it in the path of anything where a missed or late reading causes harm: not medical, not safety, not life-support, not industrial control.

The service is provided as it is. There is no uptime figure promised on this page, because a number nobody is contractually held to is decoration — what exists instead is a status page on separate infrastructure that says "unknown" rather than green when it cannot tell, and an outage alarm that emails a human.

Accounts that attack the service, try to get around the limits with many accounts, or use it to store or serve something unlawful can be suspended. Where that happens and there is a person to talk to, CSV export comes before anything is removed.

8. If Postlad shuts down

Every platform in the graveyard this product was built in reaction to also said it would not disappear, so the promise here is not "never". It is that the notice period and a full export come first — you would be emailed, given time, and CSV export would keep working throughout, which is the same escape hatch that works on any ordinary day.

9. Changes to these terms

These may change; the date at the top says when they last did. A change that materially affects what you are paying for applies from your next renewal, not retroactively, and the kind of change that takes something away is one you would be emailed about rather than left to notice.

What is stored about you, who else receives it and how to have it deleted are on the privacy page, which is short for the same reason this one is.