§ 01 · pricing · usage-based · no spend %
Pay for infrastructure, not middlemen.
Fairlead is a flat SaaS fee on ad decisions. It never takes a percentage of advertiser spend, never intermediates payments, and never pages you to upgrade. Free up to 1M decisions / month.
§ 02 Usage calculator slide → tier → monthly cost
Move the dial. See the bill.
Pricing is per million ad decisions served. The first 1M / month are free on every plan. Drag the slider to estimate your monthly cost.
Your monthly decision volume
Tier · Growth 30,000,000 decisions / mo
Freeup to 1M
Growth1M – 50M
Scale50M – 500M
Enterprise500M+
Estimated cost · monthly
$72/ mo
First 1M decisions$0.00
29M × $2.50 / M$72.50
Overage—
Support tieremail
Est. monthly$72.50
§ 03 Plans four tiers · switch any time
Four plans. The bigger you get, the less it costs per call.
Free
$0 / mo
Up to 1M decisions / month
- All SDKs
- Test + live API keys
- 1 organization
- Community support
Growth
$2.50 / M decisions
1M – 50M decisions / month
- Unlimited organizations
- Targeting + custom KV
- Event pipeline
- 99.9% SLO
Scale
$2.00 / M decisions
50M – 500M / month
- Reserved capacity
- 99.95% SLO
- Priority support
- Custom retention
Enterprise
Custom
500M+ / month · MSA
- Dedicated infra
- Single-tenant Redis
- MSA + DPA + SLA
- Named support engineer
§ 04 Feature matrix every surface · every tier
Every surface, every tier, in one table.
No footnotes, no asterisks. If it ships, it ships on every tier. Volume and reserved capacity are the only things that scale with price.
| Capability | Free | Growth ★ | Scale | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decisions & serving | ||||
| Decisions / month | 1M | 50M | 500M | Custom |
| Price per 1M (after free) | — | $2.50 | $2.00 | Negotiated |
| Regions | 2 | All | All | Dedicated |
| p99 latency SLO | <100ms | <50ms | <50ms | Contractual |
| Auctions | ||||
| Sponsored listings bidder | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Direct-sold bidder (Phase 2) | — | — | ● | ● |
| House ads bidder (Phase 2) | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Second-price auction | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Custom floor prices | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Platform | ||||
| Organizations | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| API keys | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Role-based access | admin only | 3 roles | 3 roles | 3 roles + SSO |
| Audit log retention | 7d | 90d | 1y | Custom |
| Infrastructure | ||||
| Dedicated Redis | — | — | — | ● |
| Reserved capacity | — | — | ● | ● |
| Event pipeline → Kafka | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Self-hosted option | — | — | — | ● |
| Support & compliance | ||||
| Support | Community | Email, 1 day | Priority, 4h | Named · 1h |
| MSA + DPA + SLA | — | — | ● | ● |
| SOC 2 report | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Uptime SLA | — | 99.9% | 99.95% | 99.99% |
500M+ decisions / month, or contractual requirements?
Enterprise plans add dedicated single-tenant infrastructure, named support, negotiated SLAs, and private-link networking. Most contracts close in under two weeks from first call.
Uptime99.99%
p99<50ms
MSAcustom
Support1h
§ 06 FAQ 8 common ones
Billing clarity, in eight answers.
What exactly counts as a "decision"?
A decision is a single successful
POST /decisions call that returns at least one winning candidate. No-fill responses (zero winners), auth failures, and calls that error before the auction do not count against your quota.Do impressions, clicks, and conversions count?
No. Event ingest is free on every tier. The event pipeline is metered separately only at very high volumes and communicated in advance — Growth and Scale never hit that threshold in practice.
Can I switch plans mid-month?
Yes. Downgrades take effect at the next billing cycle. Upgrades take effect immediately and are pro-rated to the day. You'll see the pro-ration as a line item on the next invoice.
What happens if I exceed my plan volume?
Overage decisions are billed at the same per-million rate as your current tier. We'll notify you by email at 80%, 100%, and 120% of your baseline. No hard caps; nothing throttles without explicit opt-in.
Do you take a percentage of ad spend?
No. Fairlead never touches advertiser money. You keep 100% of ad revenue. Our fee is flat SaaS per million decisions — that's the only thing on your invoice.
Is test traffic billed?
No. Test-environment keys (
fl_test_*) return realistic auction responses but are metered separately and never appear on invoices. Useful for CI and staging at full production volume.What's in the SOC 2 report?
SOC 2 Type II, annually audited. Available to Growth customers and above under NDA. Covers controls around data isolation, key management, audit logging, and change management.
Can I self-host?
Self-hosted deployment is available only on Enterprise. Includes Helm charts, single-tenant Redis deploy, and the Rust decision engine running on your own GKE or EKS cluster. Licensed per decision.