Pricing

Publishing on handbill.dev is free, and stays free. The paid tier buys one thing: more of it.

Per account	Free	Paid
Pages per day	25, resetting at UTC midnight	250
Stored bytes	250 MB	5 GB
Per page	5 MB	5 MB
Price	—	$8/month, $80/year

$80 a year is ten months’ price. There is no trial: a checkout that costs nothing is a checkout worth squatting, and the free tier is the trial — 25 pages a day is a lot of pages.

The read side is identical: same links, same headers, same immutability. Nothing on the path from a URL to a document ever asks whether the owner is paying, which is the whole reason a paid tier is safe to have here. A page published on the free tier and a page published on the paid one are the same object behind the same <hash>.handbill.dev hostname, cached for a year, noindex, and unchanged by anything that happens to the account afterwards.

Upgrading

handbill account --upgrade

It prints a checkout URL for the account the key in hand belongs to — the session is created server-side with the owner taken from the key, so a URL can only ever pay for the account that asked for it. Add --open to open it in the browser. Pick monthly or yearly on the page itself; both plans are on it.

Payments are handled by Polar, the merchant of record: they take the payment, charge the tax where it is owed, and their name is what appears on the statement. handbill never sees a card number. The subscription is managed from Polar’s own customer portal — that is also where it is cancelled.

The tier flips when Polar says it has: usually seconds after the payment, and handbill account is where you check.

What happens if it lapses

A cancellation, or a card that stops working, puts the account back on the free limits at the end of the period that was paid for. Concretely:

• Nothing is deleted, and no link breaks. Every page you published keeps serving at the URL you handed out, however far over the free ceiling they add up to.
• Publishing stops until you are under the free ceiling again. With more than 250 MB stored, the next publish answers 429 QuotaExceeded naming the limit — unpublishing something frees the bytes back, and so does upgrading again.
• The daily count is unaffected by any of this; it is 25 again from the next UTC midnight.

That order is deliberate. Lapsing is a billing event, not a reason to lose a page someone else is reading: the worst it can do is stop you adding to what is already there.

Self-hosting

None of this applies to your own deployment. Self-hosting is the same Worker with your own bucket, and it counts nothing — you pay Cloudflare directly, which for personal use is usually nothing at all. The hosted tiers exist so that publishing a page can cost you no account setup, not to become the place your links have to live.