- Free allowance
- The free USERS level: 20 MB disk quota for email, 20 MB for home, 20 MB for webspace and 20 MB for gopherspace; inbound ssh, ftp and sftp connections; no gcc, no python, no outbound ssh
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quota20 MB home, 20 MB webspace, 20 MB email, 20 MB gopherspace on the free level
- Evidence
- documented8 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | The free USERS level: 20 MB disk quota for email, 20 MB for home, 20 MB for webspace and 20 MB for gopherspace; inbound ssh, ftp and sftp connections; no gcc, no python, no outbound ssh unit MB; metered on stored-bytes; the same page lists a USD 36 one-time ARPA membership that adds compilers, outbound ssh and 150 MB quotas |
|---|
| Price | none stated |
|---|
| Limits | - volume-quota (binding) 20 MB home, 20 MB webspace, 20 MB email, 20 MB gopherspace on the free level source
- retention-clamped unvalidated accounts purged at about 600 days; validated accounts expire after 2 years without a login source
tens of thousands of users share one kernel; any admin can kill a process under load |
|---|
| Binding | volume-quota 20 MB of home is the smallest quota by an order of magnitude, and the free level withholds the compilers and the outbound ssh that a workload would need. |
|---|
| Identity | email the account is created interactively over SSH at ssh [address removed], then validated. No card and no phone appear on the join, signup or FAQ pages read. The exact fields of the new-user prompt were not read, so the email claim rests on the account-recovery pages rather than on the form itself. |
|---|
| Egress | not published as a volume; the free level is restricted by tool rather than by bytes (no outbound ssh, no wget, no compilers) |
|---|
| Retention | Prevalidated accounts are automatically purged whether they are in use or not approximately 600 days of their creation. Validated accounts will expire if the user does not login at least once during a 2 year period. (730 days) |
|---|
| Interface | rest, cli SSH on port 22, plus mail, gopher and web space |
|---|
| Tooling | SSH, screen or tmux, cron, a shared compiler toolchain |
|---|
| Composes with | a place to hold a shell and a cron job that survives reboots, not a place to run a server |
|---|
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
|---|
| Notes | A free shell that is real and permanent-ish, and far too small to be a machine. The 20 MB home would not hold a Python virtualenv. |
|---|
| Evidence note | documented quotas, membership levels, the USD 36 ARPA tier and the purge rules are quoted from SDF's own join and FAQ pages read. The signup form's fields are not among them. |
|---|
| Parsed numbers | - price USD 0 10 hours a day / month
- price USD 0 / month
- has-free-tier 1
- volume-quota 20 MB
|
|---|