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Fair Use Policy

What Is a Fair Use Policy?

A fair use policy (FUP) is a clause buried in a proxy provider's terms of service that imposes hidden limits on plans marketed as "unlimited." The provider advertises unlimited bandwidth, but if you actually use a lot of it, they can throttle your speeds, restrict your access, or terminate your account. The limits are usually vague and undefined, giving the provider full discretion over enforcement.

How Fair Use Policies Work

A provider sells a plan labeled "unlimited bandwidth." Somewhere in the terms, there is a fair use clause that says something like "usage must remain within reasonable limits" without defining what "reasonable" means. When a customer transfers 500 GB or 1 TB in a month, the provider decides that is too much and throttles the connection or sends a warning. The customer thought they were paying for unlimited. They were not.

Fair use policies exist because some providers oversell their infrastructure. They advertise unlimited because it sounds better, then rely on most users not hitting the hidden ceiling. The ones who do get punished for using what they paid for.

Why This Matters

If you are running serious workloads (large-scale scraping, continuous monitoring, data-intensive projects), a hidden bandwidth cap can shut you down mid-job. You budgeted for "unlimited" and got throttled at an arbitrary threshold.

ScaleProxy has no fair use policy. Unmetered means unmetered. Your throughput is governed by your thread count (threads x 2 = max Mbps), and you can push as much data through those threads as physics allows. No hidden caps, no surprise throttling, no ambiguous "reasonable use" language in the terms.

Related Terms

No Fair Use Policy. No Hidden Caps.

Unmetered means unmetered. Start your $10 for 10 days trial and see for yourself.