No paid tier in the dependency stack

No paid subs for family services. Free-tier walls fail closed

No paid tier in the dependency stack

The policy

No service in the family’s hosting, auth, database, compute, observability, or delivery stack may require a paid subscription, a credit-card-on-file, or a paid plan to function; quota walls fail closed gracefully so that the worst outcome is “service stops” and never “card gets charged thousands”.

Scope

• Every layer of the free-forever stack (static hosting, fallback host, auth, database, compute, observability, ads, billing, email, search, analytics, error tracking).
• Every external service in the AGENTS.md service catalog.
• All Chrome / Firefox / Edge extension dependencies.

Rules

• Free tier or nothing. Cloudflare Free, GitHub Free, Firebase Spark only. Never Cloudflare paid plans, never Firebase Blaze.
• No card-on-file. Per no-card-on-file rule, the failure mode “service stops at quota” is acceptable; the failure mode “card gets charged thousands due to abuse / bug / DDoS” is not.
• Fail-closed graceful degradation. When a quota wall is hit:
  • Cloudflare Pages serves HTTP 1027 — fine.
  • Workers Free returns 429 — site falls back to GitHub Pages mirror static content.
  • Firestore Spark returns resource-exhausted — site renders cached UI without user-specific data; “try again tomorrow” message.
  • The site never appears “broken”; it appears “degraded”.
• Architect for headroom. Per never-hit-quotas: add a second cache layer, switch to a different free provider, push work to GitHub Actions build time, before the wall is in sight.
• Subscription billing for users is allowed. Razorpay charges users for the family’s product — that does NOT put a card on Chirag’s file with a pay-as-you-go service. The family takes payments; the family does not pay platform bills.
• Survival fallback host. Every site has a GitHub Pages mirror so that even if the primary host’s free tier evaporates, /work + /me + /legal keep serving.

Exceptions

• Microsoft Azure for Students — free credits, time-limited. May be used for build-time ML / data tasks (e.g. computer-vision API calls during image-tools build). Production hosting stays on Cloudflare Pages.
• Domain registration at cost. Cloudflare Registrar is at-cost not free; a yearly domain renewal is the only billing-touching service in the stack and the spend is bounded by the number of domains owned.
• One-off purchases. A perpetual-license tool (e.g. a font, a one-time icon-pack purchase) is not a “subscription or card on file” and is allowed.

Annual review

Not on the annual cycle — re-evaluate on free-tier policy change announcements from any provider in the catalog. AGENTS.md service catalog is the live record.

Cross-refs

• ../rules/no-card-on-file.md — the foundational rule
• ../rules/interaction/never-hit-quotas.md — the architectural posture this policy enforces
• ../architecture/layer-3-auth-firebase-spark.md — the canonical “Spark forever, never Blaze” application
• ../monetisation/no-subscriptions-anywhere.md — the decision-version of this policy

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