Services and Fees

Service Description	Fee	Details
Sustaining Membership	$20,000/year	Includes 10 TB allowance for content preserved in the High Assurance storage class.*
High Assurance Storage	$420/year/TB	Fee for each 1 TB of additional High Assurance stored content. This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content at $0.41016 per year in the billing cycle for extra content, which is April 1 to March 31.
Basic Archive Storage	$60/year/TB	Fee for each 1 TB of additional Basic Archive stored content, with choice of AWS data center, encryption at rest by default. This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content beyond the 10 TB allowance at $0.05859 per year in the billing cycle for extra content, which is from April 1 to March 31.
Deep Archive Storage	$20/year/TB	Fee for each 1 TB of additional Deep Archive stored content. This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content at $0.01953 per year in the billing cycle for extra content, which is from April 1 to March 31.

* If an APTrust Sustaining Member chooses to use part or all of its 10 TB storage allowance of content in Basic or Deep Archive preservation storage, APTrust will apply the 10 TB allowance first to any High Assurance storage, then to the subsequent most expensive storage used and so on until the allowance is fully allocated. This process provides the most savings to the member and applies to the less-expensive preservation storage options listed above.

NOTE: APTrust measures preservation storage using the binary calculation method (1 TB equals 1024 GB, and so on). Preservation storage rates are reported in the “Fee” Column by TB to provide common whole-dollar comparisons, but storage is tracked by GB (and charged in fractions of dollars).

Definitions

Sustaining Member: An APTrust Sustaining Member is an institution of higher education or other entity so designated by the APTrust Governing Board that pays an annual Sustaining-Member fee, receives an allocation of preservation storage space at no additional charge, and plays an active role in the development of the APTrust. The fee schedule above provides details about costs. Sustaining Members receive at the outset an allowance of 10 TB at no additional charge and can acquire additional storage in 1 GB blocks at the current fee noted above.

Associate Member: Sustaining Members may extend their access to APTrust’s preservation repository by sponsoring Associate Members. Associate Members can benefit from APTrust’s preservation infrastructure without committing to a full Sustaining Membership. Their usage is reported and billed to their sponsoring Sustaining Member. Read more in our Associate Member Toolkit.

Other membership types: The APTrust Governing Board may occasionally establish other means by which APTrust’s services can be acquired by entities other than the consortium’s Sustaining Members, and those means will be defined in this document at that time.

APTrust High Assurance Storage Class: APTrust’s standard service uses a robust, redundant cloud-based design to safely store data files deposited to it by Depositors and to be able to return identical data files to the Depositor when requested, with high-assurance proof provided by widely accepted verification methods that the files are indeed identical. In this storage class, APTrust does NOT perform specific file-changing “preservation actions” on the files during or after ingest. (This includes actions such as file format migration, file normalization, creation of descriptive metadata and rights management.) Services other than APTrust’s High Assurance storage may be available through APTrust now or in the future. In its High Assurance storage, APTrust does not provide access to deposited data files to any party other than the depositor and APTrust staff. Additional details of the High Assurance storage class are available in the Preservation Policy.

The High Assurance computing and storage environment is Amazon Web Services (AWS), especially its S3 and Glacier storage environments. AWS services are available to APTrust through the University of Virginia’s access to the relevant Internet2 Net+ contract.

Additional APTrust Services: Services beyond the High Assurance storage class of APTrust are proposed by APTrust members to the APTrust Executive Director, evaluated for consistency with APTrust financial planning, and then submitted with an associated fee structure for approval by a majority vote of the APTrust Governing Board. Such services include APTrust’s Basic and Deep Archive storage classes, described in the Service and Fee Table above.

Fee Setting process: Fees for all services are proposed by the APTrust Executive Director, commented upon by advisory/work groups, and approved by a majority vote of the APTrust Governing Board. Whenever possible, changes in fees are made with sufficient notice to allow members and subscribers to incorporate them into their regular annual financial planning cycles. The APTrust Executive Director maintains this document with all current services and fees.

Last updated September 2024.