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Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.

littlecranky67 7mo ago
Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
    - embedding-shape 7mo ago
      > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
      - mcmcmc 7mo ago
        What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
        organsnyder 7mo ago
        Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
        bombcar 7mo ago
        The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
        mcmcmc 7mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
      - pixl97 7mo ago
        In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.
        7mo ago
- willis936 7mo ago
  And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
  - littlecranky67 7mo ago
    > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
  - deno 7mo ago
    Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
    - cestith 7mo ago
      Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
    - salawat 7mo ago
      Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
- hypercube33 7mo ago
  If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
  - dboreham 7mo ago
    In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
  - BobaFloutist 7mo ago
    They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
- mikepurvis 7mo ago
  Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
    - lelandfe 7mo ago
      Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
      - embedding-shape 7mo ago
        > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
        lelandfe 7mo ago
- ThatMedicIsASpy 7mo ago
  Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
- LaGrange 7mo ago
  It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
ethbr1 7mo ago
> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
- michaelbuckbee 7mo ago
  Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
  - Aerroon 7mo ago
    Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
    - Chaosvex 7mo ago
      YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
      - UltraSane 7mo ago
        YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
        computably 7mo ago
        YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
kccqzy 7mo ago
I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play. I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 7mo ago
  The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry. It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".
colechristensen 7mo ago
In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible. But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall. It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.
- Majromax 7mo ago
  You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
  - deaux 7mo ago
    > but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive. In general this is a myth promoted by platforms with millions of users. The vast majority of such large platforms could easily afford that level of human support, they just actively choose mot to give it. Blackblaxe - if they even have millions of users - belongs to the minority of such companies.
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago
  [dead]
dreamcompiler 7mo ago
Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
fuckinpuppers 7mo ago
They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.
globular-toast 7mo ago
Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.

littlecranky67 7mo ago

Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
- pixl97 7mo ago
  I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
    - mcmcmc 7mo ago
      What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
      - organsnyder 7mo ago
        Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
        mcmcmc 7mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.
      - 7mo ago
willis936 7mo ago
And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
- littlecranky67 7mo ago
  > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
- deno 7mo ago
  Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
  - cestith 7mo ago
    Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
  - salawat 7mo ago
    Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
hypercube33 7mo ago
If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
- dboreham 7mo ago
  In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
- BobaFloutist 7mo ago
  They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
mikepurvis 7mo ago
Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
  - lelandfe 7mo ago
    Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
    - embedding-shape 7mo ago
      > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
      - lelandfe 7mo ago
ThatMedicIsASpy 7mo ago
Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
LaGrange 7mo ago
It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.

ethbr1 7mo ago

> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.

michaelbuckbee 7mo ago
Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
- Aerroon 7mo ago
  Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
  - Chaosvex 7mo ago
    YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
    - UltraSane 7mo ago
      YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
      - computably 7mo ago
        YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.

kccqzy 7mo ago

I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play. I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
bombcar 7mo ago
The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry. It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".

colechristensen 7mo ago

In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible. But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall. It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.

Majromax 7mo ago
You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
- deaux 7mo ago
  > but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive. In general this is a myth promoted by platforms with millions of users. The vast majority of such large platforms could easily afford that level of human support, they just actively choose mot to give it. Blackblaxe - if they even have millions of users - belongs to the minority of such companies.
redsocksfan45 7mo ago
[dead]

dreamcompiler 7mo ago

Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

fuckinpuppers 7mo ago

They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.

globular-toast 7mo ago

Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.