Depending on your company’s plan, storage may be metered. This page explains what counts, which safeguards exist, and — most importantly — that when a limit blocks an action, nothing has been charged: every guard runs before the work starts.
What the storage meter counts #
Three things are metered, on two different clocks:
- Uploads — files you bring into the platform (imagery, geometries, datasets). Measured per month, resetting each billing month.
- Exports — the bytes your Cloud exports produce. Also monthly.
- Stored total — everything sitting in your company’s space right now. This is a standing allowance under your annual plan, not a monthly counter: it goes up as you add files and down as you delete them, rather than resetting.
One quirk to know about the stored total: it comes from a nightly snapshot plus everything added since. Deleting files frees the space immediately, but the meter only reflects it the next day — don’t be surprised if the bar doesn’t move right after a cleanup.
Monthly quotas #
Each metered kind has a monthly allowance from your company’s plan (your administrator can have per-company overrides). Going over behaves one of two ways, depending on the plan: either the action is allowed and billed as overage, or it’s blocked with a message showing your used and included amounts. Companies on credit-based plans aren’t storage-capped at all — the platform simply tells you when a limit applies.
The per-download cap #
To stop a single download from eating a large share of the month’s quota, each export has a size cap — by default one tenth of your monthly export quota. If an export’s estimated size exceeds it, you’ll see exactly that: the estimated size, your limit, and the two ways out — reduce the area or use a coarser resolution. A company super-admin can raise or lower the cap (never above the monthly quota itself).
The pixel ceiling #
Independently of file size, exports have a hard processing limit of one billion pixels (the imagery engine’s per-export ceiling). If your area ÷ resolution combination would exceed it, the export is refused up front with a suggested workable resolution for an area that size.
Below that ceiling, a large but valid export may be delivered as several tiled GeoTIFFs instead of one file — this is normal behavior of the imagery engine (Google Earth Engine), which automatically splits an export that’s too big for a single file into adjacent tiles that together cover your whole area. You’ll simply see more than one file for that export in the Cloud; nothing is missing, and they mosaic back together in any GIS.
One subtlety with Zone exports: the pixel ceiling is evaluated on the whole Area’s bounding box (that’s how the engine processes it), while the size estimate uses only the Zone. So a small Zone inside a very large Area can still trip the pixel ceiling — coarsen the resolution or split the parent Area.
Quick triage when something is blocked #
| Message says | It’s about | Fix | |—|—|—| | “…above the limit of 1,000,000,000 pixels…” | Area × resolution | Smaller area or coarser resolution | | “…over your per-download limit of N GB…” | Estimated file size | Smaller region/Zone, coarser resolution, or ask your super-admin | | “…monthly quota…” | This month’s total | Wait for the period reset, delete unneeded files, or upgrade the plan |
In all three cases the message appears before anything runs — no storage used, nothing charged.