Hot storage performance, cold storage pricing.
| Write 1 TB | $1 |
| Read 1 TB | $10 |
| Store 1 TB for a month | $2.50 |
The base unit of the network, and therefore of Tessera, is the slab: 40 MiB of logical data, erasure-coded into 30 sectors of 4 MiB each and distributed across 30 independent hosts. Any 10 of those sectors rebuild the slab. You can hold terabytes and still read back a single slab — paying the read rate only for the slabs you actually retrieve. A slab costs about $0.000042 to write, $0.000105 to keep for a month, and $0.000419 to read back.
Typical "critical backup" jobs, priced.
Rates below use the current card (storage $2.50/TB-month, uploads $1/TB, downloads $10/TB). A 40 MiB slab is the billing quantum; the costs shown already include it.
| What you protect | Logical size | Monthly storage | One write + selective read |
|---|---|---|---|
| One skills pack (100 files, ~10 KB each) | ~1 MB | $0.000002 | $0.00001 |
| 100 skills files, each stored as its own object (full slab quantum) | ~1 MB | ~$0.01 | ~$0.05 |
| Skills + project docs + a repo snapshot | ~50 MB | $0.00012 | $0.0006 |
| 1 TB research corpus, 10 slabs retrieved | 1 TB | $2.50 | $1 write + $0.004 read |
| 50 TB generated dataset archive, 1 TB of selected slabs retrieved | 50 TB | $125 | $50 write + $10 read |
Even if every item above is stored as its own object and the slab quantum is paid in full, the monthly total for a complete agent working set remains well under a dollar. Packing small files (folder upload or tessera sync) removes the per-object quantum and brings the numbers to the logical-volume column.
The comparison that matters
The cost of losing any of these items — a skills library, a decision log, a set of credentials, a repo that cannot be cheaply recomputed — is not measured in fractions of a cent. It is measured in recovery time, re-work, or permanent loss. At these rates the protection is cheaper than the downside of not having it.
Volume and bulk uploads
A bulk upload is limited by your client's bandwidth and CPU (encryption and erasure coding happen locally). On a 1 Gbps link, 100 TB is on the order of days, not hours. The CLI does not publish a guaranteed throughput; measure with a representative file before committing a large archive.