Pulsed Media Pricing Policy

Pulsed Media operates on a grandfathered rate model. Pricing is locked at the moment of order and remains stable for the life of that service on that plan. This document explains the policy, the three legitimate paths to a different bill, what we have NOT done in 16 years, and the one historical exception.

Summarized

Your rate is your rate. We won't drop it because hardware got cheaper — that's the math that kills hosting companies. We won't raise it because you've been around — that's the telco trick. If you signed up at €30/month in 2018 and the catalog now says €15, you're paying €30. If you don't like that, you can switch to a different plan at the current rate or cancel — both are real paths. What we won't do is lie about which lever you're pulling.

We have raised existing-customer rates exactly once in 16 years of operation: September 2022, during the European energy crisis. That adjustment took effect on each customer's next billing cycle, not immediately. Prepaid terms were preserved at the pre-increase rate until expiry. We disclosed the cost drivers in full and we have not raised existing-customer rates since.

What we DO do, quietly, without putting it on the invoice: we refresh hardware under your plan as it ages, and when a plan SKU gets too old we migrate you onto newer base hardware. Your rate doesn't move. Your bonus disk layers on top of the upgraded base. You've been getting more for the same money for years and we never sent the email — section 3 has the receipts.

None of this is in our Terms of Service. It is standard operating procedure — how Pulsed Media has been run since 2010, not a legal guarantee.

Pricing Policy

Concerned services

This policy covers all standard Pulsed Media offerings: shared, semi-dedicated, and managed seedbox services (Value, M1000, M10G, Dragon families and their variants), Storage Boxes, SSD seedbox tiers, and standard MiniDedi configurations. Custom and one-off configurations are negotiated per-deal and may have separately documented pricing terms.

What this policy covers

The "rate" referenced throughout this document is the recurring billing amount associated with an active service on a specific plan as of the customer's most recent renewal. The rate is set when the service is ordered, persists across renewals on the same plan, and is independent of changes to the public catalog price for that plan name.

The three legitimate paths to a different bill

A lower per-unit rate is available only when the customer offers something in return for it. There is no fourth path where the existing rate on the existing plan is reduced as a unilateral gesture.

Bigger plan / higher total spend. Move to a plan with more storage, bandwidth, or different hardware. Monthly bill goes up; service capacity goes up. The new plan runs at its current published price.
Longer commitment / lower per-unit. Switch from monthly to annual or multi-year prepayment. Per-unit cost drops; total commitment is longer.
Bigger up-front purchase / lower per-unit. Multi-server bundle, dedicated tier with combined capacity, or volume addon configuration. Total spend goes up; per-unit drops. High-volume customers should review our reseller program — discounts kick in starting at 10 services or €250/month billing (KB #48). Reseller discounts stack with annual-cycle discounts.

The connecting principle: a lower per-unit rate requires a longer commitment OR a larger purchase. This is the same structural model used by AWS Reserved Instances, Google Cloud Committed-Use Discounts, and Azure Reservations.

What does NOT change a customer's rate

The following events have no effect on an existing customer's rate:

The public catalog price for the customer's plan dropping for new customers.
Hardware generation refreshes underneath the existing plan.
New-customer promotional campaigns.
Tenure milestones (long tenure may qualify for the Free Bonus Disk Policy — a feature benefit, not a rate change).
Another customer's negotiated rate.
A general industry price decrease.
An adjustment to NEW-signup catalog pricing. (See announcement #631 for the 2024 example: catalog repriced for new signups, existing customer rates explicitly untouched. This is the grandfathered-pricing policy operating as designed.)

Cancellation and re-order

Cancelling an active service and re-ordering the same plan to obtain new-customer pricing is not a supported path. Such requests are handled as a plan change with credit for remaining prepaid time at the rate the customer actually paid. Refund-and-re-order as a re-pricing tactic is declined.

Promotional pricing

Promotional offers — Black Friday specials, holiday campaigns, and other limited-time pricing — apply to new orders and explicit upgrades only. Promotional pricing is not retroactively applied to active services. The customer who signed up during a promotional window keeps the promotional rate on that service for the life of that service on that plan; the customer who signed up at standard pricing is not retroactively converted to a later promotional rate.

Rate adjustments — historical record

Pulsed Media has adjusted existing-customer rates once in 16 years of operation:

2022-09-03 — European energy crisis adjustment. Tiered increase of +15% to +35% on services in the €10–€30/month range, plus a flat €3.50/month surcharge on services below €5.50/month. The adjustment took effect on each customer's next billing cycle, not immediately. Prepaid terms were preserved at the pre-increase rate until expiry; customers could lock in the pre-increase rate by renewing or extending in advance. Cost drivers cited at announcement: wholesale electricity approximately +89% (with Q4/2022 – Q1/2023 crisis projections of 4–8x normal), staffing +50%, transit +23%, fuel +60–100%, building costs +90%, administrative overhead +75%, hardware +15% (USD/EUR FX). Reference: announcement #559.

If a future material upstream cost increase forces another existing-customer rate adjustment, it will be announced explicitly with the cost drivers named, applied on the next billing cycle, with prepaid terms preserved.

What we do silently (the part you may not have noticed)

Pulsed Media refreshes the hardware running every existing customer's service on the operator's schedule, not the customer's. As servers age, customer services migrate to newer hardware. As plan SKUs age, customer base allocations are increased. The customer's rate doesn't move. The customer gets more.

This happens to nearly every active customer, multiple times across their tenure. It is not announced. There is no email when your storage allocation expands or when your VM moves to a faster host. The work is invisible because your job is to use the service, not to track where it runs.

Long-tenure customers' Free Bonus Disk allocation layers on the UPGRADED base, not the original SKU. A customer who signed up in 2014 on a 2014-vintage base has been migrated to 2026-vintage base hardware over the intervening years AND has bonus disk on top of the 2026 base, while paying the 2014 rate.

This practice continues at operator discretion. It is not a contractual commitment — it is how Pulsed Media has been run since 2010.

Industry comparison

Hosting industry — three patterns observed:

Auto-match-catalog model: existing customer rates reduce when catalog drops. Hosting companies that run this pattern do NOT survive. The math is in section 5.
Silent-creep-up model: surface catalog stable; existing rates increase quietly at renewal. Common in legacy hosting and consumer telco services.
Grandfathered-stable model (Pulsed Media): rates stable in both directions; cost-shock-driven adjustments are announced explicitly. Hetzner is a public counter-example operating without grandfathering in either direction — the April 2026 30–37% increase applied to both new and existing customers.

Cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure): structurally do not auto-lower existing customer rates. Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Sustained-Use Discounts, Committed-Use Discounts are all customer-elected commitment paths or automatic volume-of-use credits. The Pulsed Media three-paths rule is the small-hosting analog.

Telcos / ISPs: the silent-creep-up model. The UK Office of Communications loyalty-penalty review identified approximately 8.7 million customers paying an average of £112 above new-customer rates, leading to mandated alignment for several major operators (Ofcom 2018). Pulsed Media does not run this pattern. The symmetric consequence is that Pulsed Media also does not auto-lower existing customer rates.

The math — why price erosion kills hosting

A hosting business has roughly flat per-customer cost-to-deliver for an existing customer in NOMINAL pre-inflation terms — drives age in real time, rack space is allocated, the power draw is what it is. But "flat" only holds before inflation hits the inputs. In real terms, the cost to keep an existing customer's already-deployed service running rises every year with the cost of electricity, datacenter rent, network transit, hardware replacement, and staffing.

The 2020-2025 period was devastating for these inputs. Headline Finland consumer-price inflation — the official statistic, which is the conservative LOW-BOUND measure — ran:

Year	Finland CPI
2020	+0.29%
2021	+2.19%
2022	+7.12%
2023	+6.25%
2024	+1.57%

Cumulative official 2020 to end of 2024: approximately +18.5%, average ~3.5%/year. (Source: World Bank, Statistics Finland.)

That number is the headline. It is not the lived reality. CPI methodology reweights the basket, applies hedonic adjustments, smooths "volatile" inputs like food and energy, and underweights or excludes the costs that actually hit a hosting business: electricity, datacenter rent, hardware replacement, staffing, and the cost of moving and securing data. Things outside the CPI tracking basket increased much more than the headline number says. Pulsed Media's own December 2022 statement on the inflation cycle made this point at the time (Facing Inflation and Energy Crisis): "CPI is misleading and lagging indicator."

For a hosting business specifically, the lived input-cost inflation over 2020-2025 ran in the 10%/year-and-above range — multiples above the headline CPI. Concrete data points:

Finland Nord Pool wholesale electricity averaged €22-28/MWh in 2020 and peaked at €261.53/MWh in August 2022 — +460% over the 2020 baseline.
Pulsed Media's own 2022 cost-driver disclosure (announcement #559) quantified specific input lines: electricity +89% (with crisis projections of 4-8x normal), buildings +90%, staffing +50%, fuel +60-100%, accounting/admin overhead +75%, hardware +15% on EUR/USD FX alone.

The customer reading this is also living through the same period — rent, food, energy at home. The CPI says one number; the bank balance says another. The hosting cost-base lives in the same reality.

If existing customer rates are auto-matched downward to a falling new-customer catalog WHILE input costs rise 10%/year, the math is brutal.

Worked example (illustrative — with 10%/year input inflation):

Year 0: 1,000 customers at €15/month = €15,000 revenue. Cost-to-deliver €10,000. Margin €5,000.
Year 1: rates auto-drop 5% to match catalog → revenue €14,250. Costs +10% → €11,000. Margin €3,250.
Year 2: revenue €13,537. Costs €12,100. Margin €1,437.
Year 3: revenue €12,860. Costs €13,310. Margin -€450 (the company is now losing money on every existing customer).

In real-world inflation, the auto-match-catalog scenario does not take 7 years to kill margin. It takes 2 to 3.

The companies that can offer auto-match-catalog sustainably are AWS and the large hyperscalers — and even they do not auto-lower existing customer rates. They give customers customer-elected commitment paths instead. That is the structural fact behind Pulsed Media's three-paths rule.

Frequently asked questions

My usage has dropped — can my rate drop too?

A rate drop on the existing plan is not part of the policy. A plan change to a smaller plan at that plan's current pricing is supported. Remaining prepaid value on the existing plan is credited at the rate you actually paid.

My usage has grown — can I upgrade?

Yes. Plan changes upward follow the same procedure: new plan at current pricing, prepaid value credited from the existing plan.

I signed up during a promotion. Does the promo rate stay?

Depends on the promo. If the promotion was recurring (the offer terms at signup stated so), the recurring rate you paid is the rate you keep. If the promotion was first-billing-cycle-only (most "Black Friday" / one-time-credit style), the first invoice was at the discounted rate but renewals revert to the plan's standard rate. Whatever rate you've been paying RECURRING is the grandfathered rate going forward.

Can I cancel and re-order to get the new-customer rate?

No. Plan changes are the supported route to different pricing.

Can I negotiate?

Standard products run on standard pricing. Custom configurations and dedicated server deals are quoted per arrangement.

A competitor matched their existing customer rates to their new-customer rates. Why doesn't Pulsed Media?

Companies that run that pattern in hosting do NOT survive. Pulsed Media has been continuously available since 2010; the grandfathered-stable model is part of why.

What about inflation? My rate is the same but everything got more expensive.

Pulsed Media's costs are also subject to general price changes. Rates are stable in both directions: your rate doesn't auto-decrease for catalog drops, and doesn't auto-increase for inflation. The only existing-customer rate adjustment in 16 years (2022 energy crisis, see section above) was disclosed at the time with the cost drivers named.