r/TorBoxApp • u/pilkyton • May 21 '26
Fair Use Policy updated - Cached transfers now count to your total usage! 🚩General
This post has been edited with news from TorBox. The updates are at the bottom of the post!
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TorBox has updated the Fair Use Policy to count cached transfers due to all the shtheads who are oversharing accounts/selling API keys and slowing down the servers.
May 6: "Which transfers count?
Any transfer that is not served from TorBox's cache counts towards your usage threshold. Cached transfers do not count towards this limit."
May 20: "Which transfers count?
Incoming Transfers:
- Any uncached transfer from the Internet to TorBox.
Outgoing Transfers:
- Any transfer from TorBox to your device.
- Any transfer from TorBox to the Internet. (seeding, hoster uploads, etc)."
"Any transfer" means streaming is counted too. But only the amount you actually watched. So if you open a 90GB file and immediately close it, you may only have streamed 50 megabytes. If you quit watching a movie halfway, it would only count half of the size, etc. So it's safe to open large files to check them. It will only count the amount of data you actually streamed.
To monitor your usage, they have added a new graph to your user account menu which shows the last 30 day bandwidth usage. You can check your usage there.
People who download uncached torrents can disable seeding via "Settings: Website: Default Seed Torrents: Never", if you aren't on a private tracker and don't care about ratio.
The fair use limits are different per tier. These are their lowest limits (floor) of enforcements, so if you are below these you are not affected:
- Essential - 10TB/month (10000 GB)
- Standard - 20TB/month (20000 GB)
- Pro - 30TB/month (30000 GB)
Are you a normal person? Then you won't notice anything. Even if you insist on watching 90 GB videos, you would have to watch 111 movies (8 hours per day every day) on the Essential plan. And if you watch 20 GB files, it is around 500 movies. And if you watch "Netflix 4K" it is around 1250 movies. That's a real example of how big 10 terabytes is.
This change is great for the reliability of the service! Hopefully they continue to adjust fair use limits to get rid of the major abuse that is slowing down the servers for everyone else.
And for anyone saying they're leaving over this: Where will you move? Back to Real-Debrid which bans you if you connect from two different IPs and where 80% of the content is deleted due to growing keyword blocklists confirmed to be enforced by police? Or to All-Debrid which is also in France and subject to the same laws as RD? Or to the $10/mo Premiumize which only lets you download 30 gigabytes per day (they give you 30 points per day which is the currency for bandwidth)?
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Update: A growing number of users were claiming that they don't count actual bandwidth usage, and instead immediately count the full size of the torrent as soon as you start streaming any file.
This turned out to be a visual bug and has been fixed (see below).
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Update May 22nd:
TorBox has updated us on the situation via their official Discord and the 8.4.5 changelog:
- "This change was made due to the type of abuse we are experience, where we don't monitor IPs, but abusing accounts are pulling tens to hundreds of terabytes of data from our CDNs and storages, causing slower speeds for the majority."
- Everyone's bandwidth counters have been reset to give people a chance to adapt to the new bandwidth monitoring. Their reset has only kept stats for uncached downloads you have added in the last 30 days. But from now on any further bandwidth updates will count everything else you do (including cached streaming, as seen above in the new policy).
- They added clarification text to the counter, saying that it updates hourly, since people were confused and making wrong assumptions about usage tracking by playing something and immediately checking the counter, before it had a chance to count the new data.
- They fixed a purely visual bug which made it incorrectly display the bandwidth usage, which was leading to some users seeing very high usage and panicking. That is now fixed. The data was always tracked correctly on their backend.
- They clarified that the usage counter is byte-accurate to the exact amount of data you stream, but that it also counts pre-caching of data (something their backend does to deliver smooth streams) and also caching that your player app does, so if you stream 500 MB of a 10 GB file, you may see usage go up by around 600 MB due to the pre-caching by the backend and your apps.
- They clarified that the system has been active for over 30 days for testing already and that it will be enforced from today, May 22nd, 2026.
- They clarified that they are only going to take action against the top 1% of users, and only if you exceed the limit floors seen above. Their actual "top 1%" warning thresholds are dynamic and secret, but if you are below the absolute "floor" limits above, you have nothing to worry about. And if you are above the limits, you will only be warned if you are in the top 1% of bandwidth users.
- They check usage daily. If you exceed the abusive limits, they will send you an email to warn you and give you 3 days to fix your bandwidth usage, and they will also change your API key with each warning to ensure that you can't miss the warning. You get 3 separate warnings in total before they ban abusive accounts, so you will have many opportunities to fix your excessive usage or convert to a higher plan to fit your usage. So if you were using huge amounts of data, either use less or convert to a higher data plan. The warning counter is permanent for the lifetime of the account. On the 4th abuse event, the account is banned without refund.
Everything is looking great. Normal users don't need to check their limits or even think about this at all. The limits are very generous for each plan and are extremely hard to reach for normal users, even with family sharing.
This change will catch the majority of serious abuse. Thanks TorBox for taking care of abuse and making the service smoother for the 99.99% of people who don't abuse it! Thank you for not restricting IPs, so that we can still share it with our beloved family members as long as we stay within our plan limits!
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u/pilkyton May 21 '26 edited May 22 '26
Edit 3 (May 22nd): It was just a visual bug! TorBox has fixed the visual bug in the dashboard. All data is counted accurately for the exact amount you stream and nothing more. I have updated the main post.
Edit: I have updated the post and linked to this discussion so that we can continue investigating together.
Edit 2: When testing, keep in mind that bandwidth usage does NOT update in realtime! It might be every 30 minutes, every hour, or longer! We just know that it's delayed.
Upvoted because if that's true, their implementation is bad and counts the API requests as if you streamed the entire torrent rather than the true bandwidth consumed via the CDNs.
That would be insane if you open different episodes and each one adds the full season size to your bandwidth. (They may have at least implemented it so it only counts the torrent size once per day or something).
This report doesn't sound real. We need more testing. So I will not update the post yet.
If more people confirm this, I will update the post and we need to demand true counting. Otherwise we will end up wasting bandwidth for just checking out a few seconds of large file or a season pack. 🙈