We need to talk about the sustainable future of Fivemanage.
Over the past year, Fivemanage has grown far beyond what we originally planned. We now serve billions of requests per month across thousands of organizations. That growth is something we're genuinely proud of — but it has come with a cost that we can no longer absorb.
You may have noticed that Fivemerr recently shut down. They aren't the first, and they won't be the last. The "unlimited free" hosting model doesn't work. It has never worked. Every service that promises it either runs out of money, degrades in quality, or both. We watched it happen, and we refuse to let it happen to us.
We don't want to shut down. We want to be here for years. To do that, we have to stop losing money on excessive free usage.
The Reality Behind the Numbers
We recently completed a full audit of our infrastructure costs and usage patterns. Honestly, the numbers blew us away — in a good way. Some of you are building seriously impressive things on top of Fivemanage:
- Organizations pushing hundreds of terabytes of bandwidth per month
- Accounts generating millions of requests as part of their daily operations
- Usage that tells us we built something people genuinely rely on
That level of adoption is incredible, and we love seeing it. But it also means our infrastructure costs have scaled well past what the current model can support. We're spending thousands of dollars per month to keep things running, and without a path to cover those costs, the quality of service for everyone starts to suffer.
We are moving from what was essentially a charity model to a sustainable business model — not because we're frustrated with our users, but because we want to keep building for them.
What's Changing
Effective March 20th, 2026, we are introducing bandwidth and request limits across all tiers.
The Free Tier
The Free Tier will now include 30 GB of bandwidth and 500,000 requests per month.
Before you panic: this limit is still generous enough for 58% of our current users. If you're running a small development server, a testing environment, or a personal project, you will likely never hit this cap. This change targets commercial-scale abuse, not hobbyist developers.
What happens if you hit the limit? Your service will be paused until the next billing cycle, or until you upgrade to a paid plan. We won't delete your files — they'll be waiting for you.
New Paid Plans
For those of you who need more, we've built three straightforward tiers:
| Plan | Price | Bandwidth | Requests | Extras |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $8/mo | 200 GB | 3 Million | — |
| Pro | $15/mo | 1 TB | 10 Million | Custom Domains |
| Business (coming soon) | $49/mo | 5 TB | 50 Million | Public Upload Portal, 90-Day File Recovery |
No hidden fees. Pick the plan that fits your server and go.
Overage Policy
If you're on a paid plan and you go over your limit, we don't shut you down. Your service stays online. Overage is billed at the end of the cycle at these rates:
- $4.00 per TB of additional bandwidth
- $1.50 per 1 Million additional requests
You can set usage alerts in your dashboard to avoid surprises.
Estimate Your Bandwidth Cost
Not sure how much you'll spend on bandwidth? We built a simple calculator to help you estimate your monthly cost based on your usage. Just plug in your expected bandwidth and see the price instantly.
Use the Bandwidth Calculator →
What You Need to Do
- Log in to your dashboard and check your current bandwidth and request usage.
- Review which plan fits your needs. Most small servers will be fine on Free. Medium community servers should look at Hobby or Pro.
- You have until March 20th, 2026 to upgrade or clean up unused files before limits are enforced.
If you're well above the Pro or the upcoming Business tier and need a custom arrangement, reach out to us directly. We're happy to work with large-scale operators on volume pricing.
Why This Matters
We could have done what others did — run until the money ran out and post a shutdown notice. Instead, we're choosing to be honest with you. Running infrastructure at this scale costs real money. CDN egress, storage and compute — none of it is free, and pretending otherwise only delays the inevitable.
These changes let us reinvest in what matters: faster delivery, better uptime, new features, and a platform you can actually rely on long-term.
We're not going anywhere. But we need your help to make that possible.
Non-Profit Communities
If you're running a non-profit community server and these changes put you in a tough spot, we want to hear from you. We're happy to work out complimentary bandwidth and adjusted limits on a case-by-case basis — just reach out to us at support@fivemanage.com and tell us a bit about your community.
- The Fivemanage Team