Free Plan Limits Explained, What Happens When You Hit Them and What to Do Next

Four numbers bound the Filestack free plan, and what happens when you hit them depends on which one you hit. Three of the four limits reset every month and one never does. Most projects meet one line long before the others, and which line that is comes down to what you build. Each limit is explained below with what it counts, how far it goes, and what to do next when you reach it.

 

Key takeaways

• Uploads, bandwidth and transformations reset monthly, while Filestack storage is a standing total that falls only when you delete.
• Transformations count distinct processing URLs rather than visits, so estimate how many widths and formats your templates generate.
• A 403 naming a task is a capability boundary, not a quota, and it will not clear when the month rolls over.
• Bandwidth spans more than twenty to one between a 320 pixel thumbnail and a full width image, so page weight decides the limit.
• Overage rates are published from Start upward, so the route past a free plan limit is moving up rather than paying per unit.

What each counter measures

Checked on the free plan page on 6 August 2026.

Limit	Free plan	What it counts	Resets
Uploads	500	Files coming in, however they arrive	Monthly
Bandwidth	1 GB	Bytes going out to viewers	Monthly
Transformations	1,000	Distinct processing URLs generated	Monthly
Storage	1 GB	Originals currently held	Never, it is a standing total
Team members	1	People with access to the application	Not applicable

 

The storage row is the one that surprises people. Uploads, bandwidth and transformations start again at zero at the beginning of each month. Storage does not. It is how much you are holding right now, so it only comes down when you delete something.

The distinctions that decide the arithmetic

Transformations count URLs, not requests. The first person to request resize=width:400/HANDLE triggers a transformation. Everybody after that is served from the cache, and the count does not move. So the number to estimate is how many distinct widths and formats your templates generate, multiplied by your file count, not how many visitors you expect. Three widths across 200 images is 600 transformations, whether ten people or ten thousand look at them.

Bandwidth counts what you actually send. Serving a 1600 pixel image into a 400 pixel slot spends four times the bandwidth for no visible difference. This is where a page shape shows up in the bill.

Storage counts originals only. Every variant is generated at request time and none is stored. A photograph you serve at six sizes still occupies its original size once.

Uploads count files in. Overwriting an existing handle is not a new upload. A form that re-uploads on every autosave will exhaust 500 far quicker than it fills 1 GB.

How far each limit actually goes

Measured on 6 August 2026 against a 319,136 byte photograph:

What you serve	Requests inside 1 GB of bandwidth
A 320 px WebP thumbnail	about 89,000
A 768 px WebP hero image	about 26,000
A 1600 px WebP full width image	about 4,000
The untouched original	about 3,300

 

The spread across those rows is more than twenty to one, which is why bandwidth is rarely the real constraint. Page weight is.

What happens when you reach one

Overage rates are published for Start, Grow and Scale, starting at $0.20 per GB of bandwidth and falling as the plan gets larger. No overage rate is published for the free plan, so the route past a free plan limit is moving up to Start rather than paying by the unit. If you are close and the month is nearly over, the monthly counters reset on their own.

Storage is different again, because it does not reset. If you are at the 1 GB line, the two ways down are deleting files you no longer serve, or moving up.

The 403 that is not a limit at all

A second Filestack boundary gets mistaken for a quota. Some processing operations answer with a 403 and this message:

You don’t have permission to perform this task: ocr. Please check your access settings

That is not “you have run out”. It is an operation your plan does not include, and it will say the same thing on your first request of the month as on your thousandth.

The line is easy to predict. Operations that change a file’s shape, size or format run on the free plan: resize, crop, rotate, watermark, compress, quality, format conversion, PDF conversion, minification, zipping, and face detection, so you can blur faces without moving up. The parameters for each are in the image editing api guide.

Operations that read and interpret what is inside a file run on the higher plans: text recognition, image tagging, safe for work classification, captioning, copyright checking, document detection, sentiment, smart cropping, enhancement, upscaling and video conversion. Those run trained models rather than arithmetic, which is why the tiers divide there.

One pair is worth separating carefully. Pulling text out of a PDF that already has a text layer is output=format:txt and runs on the free plan. Reading text off a scan or a photograph is optical character recognition and runs on Start and above. They look identical from the outside, so check which one your documents need before you design around it.

What to do about each limit

Limit	First thing to try	Why it works
Bandwidth	Cap the widths in your templates and add output=format:webp	WebP is around a fifth smaller, and width is worth far more than that
Transformations	Standardise on three or four widths across the whole site	The count is distinct URLs, so fewer variants costs nothing in quality
Uploads	Overwrite handles instead of uploading replacements	An overwrite is not a new upload
Storage	Delete originals for work you no longer serve	It is the only counter that never resets

 

The format decision behind that first row is covered in the guide on when to convert to webp, and caching, which is what keeps repeat views off the transformation counter, in the guide to global file delivery.

The signals you have outgrown it

Tuning helps until it does not. Four things say the ceiling is real rather than a page weight problem:

A capability you need is on a higher plan. If the product depends on reading text or tagging content, no amount of tuning gets you there.

A second person needs access. The free plan carries one team member, and shared credentials is not a workaround worth having.

Traffic is growing month over month. Bandwidth scales with visitors and tuning is a one time gain.

Storage is climbing and nothing is deletable. A catalogue that only grows meets 1 GB on a schedule you can predict.

Moving up

Start is $69 a month and takes the same four counters to 75 GB of bandwidth, 20,000 uploads, 50,000 transformations and 50 GB of storage, with up to five team members and the AI-backed operations included. Grow and Scale sit above it at $199 and $379.

Nothing you have built changes when you move. Handles stay the same, URLs stay the same, and the code carries over untouched, which also makes it straightforward to fold what you have into a fuller file delivery workflow.

 

 

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