Priced per spacecraft, billed monthly or annually, in euro. Every plan includes the full ingest pipeline and the window catalogue. What changes between plans is retention, throughput, alerting depth and how much of it you run yourself.
For one spacecraft and one operator. Free indefinitely, with a fair-use ingest limit.
For a working constellation with a small team. The plan most operators run on.
For multi-satellite operations with station diversity and audited access control.
For operators with in-house infrastructure requirements or regulator-driven controls.
Prices exclude VAT. Annual billing is 15% below the monthly rate. Aircraft and spacecraft not operated by you are not billed: a partner downlink of a customer satellite is included in the Constellation and Fleet plans at no extra cost.
The differences between plans should be differences in scale, not differences in capability.
CCSDS transport frames, Space Packet Protocol, SLE and CFDP. Ingest adapters for legacy housekeeping formats.
Exports to AWS, GCP or any S3-compatible endpoint, with raw frames retained alongside decoded values.
Contact windows computed from your elements for the stations you name, with no cap on how many you schedule.
Every plan gets the full REST API, scoped tokens, idempotency keys and an append-only audit log.
Every figure below is a limit per account, not per spacecraft, unless the row says otherwise.
| Limit | Solo | Operator | Constellation | Fleet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spacecraft | 1 | 10 | 60 | Unlimited |
| Packets per month | 2 M | 50 M | 500 M | Negotiated |
| Ground station connections | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Telemetry retention | 7 days | 90 days | 2 years | Up to 7 years |
| Raw frame retention | 7 days | 90 days | 2 years | Up to 7 years |
| Concurrent exports | 1 | 4 | 16 | Negotiated |
| Alert delivery channels | Email, webhook | Email, webhook, chat | Email, webhook, chat, PagerDuty | |
| Alert rule types | Threshold | Threshold, gap | All | All |
| Command approval | — | — | Single control | Dual control |
| SSO | — | — | — | SAML and OIDC |
| Ingest SLA | Best effort | 99.9% | 99.95% | 99.99% |
| Support response | Community | 4 business hours | 1 business hour | 15 minutes, 24/7 |
| Self-hosted collector | — | — | Add-on | Included |
| Price | €0 | €149 | €690 | Custom |
Optional pieces that attach to a plan rather than replacing it.
Additional months of telemetry and raw frame retention beyond the plan default, at €18 per spacecraft per month per year of retention.
Reserved capacity at a Helion ground station for your downlink, with a guaranteed window allocation and no contention with other operators.
The collector appliance running in your facility, forwarding over a link you control, with the same decoder as the hosted path.
Spacecraft beyond the plan limit, at €22 per spacecraft per month on Operator and €14 on Constellation.
A managed Airflow or Prefect deployment that runs your export schedules and lands the results in your warehouse with alerting on failure.
A two-day remote session covering ingest configuration, the APID dictionary and the alerting model, with the result being a working first pass.
Questions we are actually asked, including the awkward ones about accounts and money.
One object with its own COSPAR identifier and its own APID map. A spacecraft that is operated by a partner and downlinked through your station is not counted against your limit, because you do not control its telemetry dictionary. If you are unsure, ask us and we will check the registry before your invoice is issued.
A packet is one Space Packet Protocol packet accepted at the ingest edge after validation, whether or not it maps to a known APID. Rejected frames are not counted, and retransmitted packets are deduplicated before counting, so a flaky station link does not inflate the bill. The counter is visible in the API in real time, not only on the invoice.
Ingest availability on the path from edge acknowledgement to queryable data, measured minute-weighted over a calendar month. It does not cover a ground station that is offline, a spacecraft that is not transmitting, or an element file that is wrong. Credit requests are made through the support channel and are settled as a percentage of the monthly fee without requiring a root-cause document.
Card or SEPA direct debit for monthly plans, invoice for annual agreements. The Solo plan never requires a card. Invoices are issued in euro, and where your entity is outside the euro area we convert at the ECB reference rate on the invoice date. Icelandic VAT is added at 24% where it applies; reverse charge applies for business customers in other EU member states with a valid VAT number.
Yes, in either direction, at any time. An upgrade is applied immediately and the difference is prorated to the day. A downgrade takes effect at the start of the next billing period, and we will not delete data that the new plan's retention no longer covers — it stays available until the existing retention window expires, and we will tell you the date.
Exports to your own bucket remain yours, always. During the paid period you can export everything in the archive at any time. After the period ends, the archive is retained for 30 days and then deleted, and we send a confirmation when deletion is complete. You can request an early deletion, which takes effect within 24 hours.
Annual billing is 15% below the monthly rate on Operator and Constellation. There is no discount on the Solo plan because there is nothing to discount. We do not offer multi-year lock-in discounts; if the price changes, existing customers keep their rate for the term they have paid for.
Yes. Registered research institutions and non-commercial operators can apply for the Operator plan at no charge for the first year, including the 90-day retention, on the basis of a short written application. Commercial use of the same platform afterwards is charged at the standard rate.
On the Fleet plan we provide a self-hosted collector that runs in your facility and forwards to Helion. The full platform is not available on-premises: the ingest edge, the window computation service and the audit log are operated as a hosted service, which is what allows us to publish an availability commitment against them.
We will not cut off your stream. The ingest continues and you are moved to the Operator plan at the standard rate, with the difference charged to the payment method on file or, if there is none, invoiced. The Solo plan is meant for genuine single-spacecraft use, and we would rather talk to you than stop your telemetry.
One spacecraft, one station, no card. Move up when the constellation grows, not before.