title: Understanding fuel audience: user
Understanding fuel
Your relay is free until it passes a monthly allowance. Past that, use is paid for in sats. Anyone can top up a relay by zapping it.
What is measured
Four resource lines are measured and priced in fuel. Each mirrors a major line on the hosting bill, while provider request charges and other deployment costs remain outside the tenant meter.
| Measured | Free each month |
|---|---|
| Events stored | 100 MB |
| Files stored | 1 GB |
| Time awake | 100 hours |
| Rows written | 250,000 |
Traffic bytes in and out have no fuel price. The console shows them so you can see what the relay does. The host still pays any provider request or platform charge attached to moving or storing those bytes.
Time awake estimates how long the relay is in memory from its entrypoints. It can sleep between messages, while alarms and scheduled jobs wake it even when no client is connected. The meter adds ten seconds after a wake, then the gap between entrypoints capped at ten seconds. It does not time a whole long-running job. Jobs on the Sync tab, pulls, backfills, rebroadcasts, Git requests and site work all wake the relay. The host's actual duration cost can be higher or lower than this estimate.
Dumps, the JSONL files the Data tab can write on a schedule, live next to uploaded files and count as files stored. What each job and dump does is in Data and names.
Rows written is database work. A note costs a few rows. Reactions and other small events cost about the same.
The newer doors use these same meters. NIP-5A files mirrored into the relay are part of Files stored. Git repositories store compressed chunks, refs and receipts in the relay's SQLite database, so they are part of Events stored. A site cache miss, site mirror, Git clone or Git push also wakes the relay and can write events or accounting rows. Marmot KeyPackages and encrypted group envelopes are ordinary stored events, so they use Events stored and Rows written. HTTP request and response bytes are shown as traffic for your information, but traffic has no fuel price. There is no separate tenant charge for a site, Marmot or GRASP request. There is no separate tenant charge for Git requests.
GRASP keeps bounded object, decoded-pack, retained-history, ref and repository limits. It has no transaction-count ceiling, but it still bounds its object, byte and receipt work. These limits share the existing storage allowances rather than adding a new one. Signed events wait for their required Git objects before publication. Deleting a ref or expiring metadata does not reclaim immutable Git history; those bytes remain in SQLite until the relay is deleted. See GRASP-01 Git hosting for the full limits.
Git storage includes transaction receipts and retained bookkeeping as well as
objects. It is not a fixed reservation per repository: the total grows with
its history, including ref-only updates. The Health tab shows the combined
storage total. The gitstorage management method gives owners a bounded
backend-specific breakdown without authorizing deletion.
Prices past the allowance
| Measured | Price |
|---|---|
| Events stored | 400 sats per gigabyte-month |
| Files stored | 30 sats per gigabyte-month |
| Time awake | 11 sats per hour |
| Rows written | 2,000 sats per million |
Storage is charged daily, in proportion to how far over the allowance the relay is. Time and rows are charged as they happen. The current prices are always on the relay's Fuel section and on the bind.ws front page.
Topping up
On your relay's page, enter an amount and click Zap to top up. Your extension signs a zap request, and the page shows a lightning invoice. Pay it from any lightning wallet. The receipt lands on your relay and credits it within a minute.
You do not have to be the owner. Anyone can zap any relay.
Running out
When a relay is over an allowance with no balance, it goes read-only. Clients get a clear message when they try to publish. Nothing is deleted. Ordinary reading, searching and syncing keep working, while GRASP Git hosting refuses requests until the balance or allowance permits it. Remote site fetches and mirroring also stop; already stored site files remain readable under the relay's read rule. A sufficient top-up lifts the fuel restriction.
Seeing the numbers
https:/ is public and returns the meters, allowances, prices, balance and recent zaps as JSON. The Health tab shows the same numbers.
The meters are the relay's view of usage, not a complete provider invoice. Cloudflare storage and database request charges can include R2 operations, KV operations and SQLite work that does not map one-for-one to stored bytes or the rows counted by the relay. The host checks those provider bills separately; the four fuel lines are the transparent budget shown to you.