Services and Fees

Service Description	Fee	Details
Sustaining Membership Annual Fee	$20,000/year	Includes 10TB allowance for content preserved in the High Assurance storage class.*
High Assurance Storage	$420/year/TB	Fee for each 1TB 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 1TB 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 10TB allowance at $0.05859 per year in the billing cycle for extra content, which is April 1 to March 31.
Deep Archive Storage	$20/year/TB	Fee for each 1TB 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 April 1 to March 31.

* If an APTrust member chooses to use part or all of its included-in-member-dues allowance of 10TB of content in non-core-service preservation storage, APTrust will apply the 10TB allowance first to any core-service storage used, then to the next most expensive storage used and so on until the allowance is fully allocated. This process provides the greatest savings to the member, and it applies to all of the less-expensive preservation storage options listed above.

NOTE: APTrust measures preservation storage using the binary calculation method (1 terabyte equals 1024 gigabytes, and so on). Preservation storage rates are reported in the “Fee” Column by terabyte to provide common whole-dollar comparisons, but storage is tracked by gigabyte (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, but Sustaining Members receive at the outset an allowance of 10 terabytes at no additional charge and will be able to acquire additional storage in 1 gigabyte blocks at the current fee noted above.

Other membership types: The APTrust Governing Board may from time to time 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 Strage Class: APTrust core 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 Archive and Deep Archive storage classes, which are 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 cycles of financial planning. This document is maintained by the APTrust Executive Director with all current services and fees.

Last updated September 2024.