Updated: March 23, 2026
Fair Usage Policy
This document describes LocalStack’s “Fair Use Policy” for what is referred to as Fair Usage of our Service under your governing agreement.
LocalStack is priced per developer license. Each developer license supports one developer using LocalStack during their normal development workflow.
In practice, LocalStack may be used in:
- individual development, where developers run LocalStack on their personal machines while writing and testing code; or
- automation environments, where LocalStack runs inside CI pipelines or automated test systems.
To support these authorized use cases, LocalStack provides two types of authentication tokens:
- Personal Auth Tokens: used by individual developers; and
- CI Auth Tokens: used by automation systems
This policy clarifies how these tokens are to be used and aims to ensure that individual developer licenses are not used to operate large-scale organizational infrastructure without an appropriate subscription Tier.
Personal Auth Tokens
Personal tokens are used appropriately when:
- Each developer uses their own Personal Auth Token.
- Personal Auth Tokens are used on a developer’s local machine or personal development environment.
Personal Auth Tokens should not be used for shared infrastructure or automation. For example, it would not be appropriate to:
- share one Personal Auth Token across multiple developers;
- run CI pipelines using Personal Auth Tokens; or
- embed Personal Auth Tokens into shared scripts, containers, or internal platforms
A simple rule of thumb:
Personal tokens represent people, not systems.
CI Auth Tokens
CI Auth Tokens are used appropriately when:
- CI Auth Tokens are used in automation environments such as CI pipelines or automated testing workflows.
- Each CI Auth Token is associated with a single automation workflow (such as a CI pipeline).
- The scale of CI Auth Token usage supports the number of projects that is roughly in line with the number of authorized users (i.e., active developers) using LocalStack (licenses) associated with the user and/or the corresponding organization.
CI Auth Tokens may not operate LocalStack’s Service as shared infrastructure. For example, it would not be appropriate to:
- run a single shared LocalStack environment used by many pipelines or developers across a team or organization;
- use a small number of CI Auth Tokens to power automation that supports significantly more engineers than the licensed seats; and
- host LocalStack inside an internal developer platform where teams connect to a long-running instance.
For use in the cases listed above, please contact our team to discuss custom subscriptions.
A simple rule of thumb:
CI tokens represent automation workflows, not shared infrastructure
How we think about fairness
LocalStack is a developer infrastructure tool that runs in your own environment. Because of this, usage cannot always be measured directly.
Instead, Fair Usage is assessed based on the relationship between three factors:
- number of authorized users (i.e., developers) using LocalStack (licenses);
- number of automation systems using LocalStack (CI workflows or pipelines); and
- scale of automated runs and environments
As a general rule:
- Personal Auth Tokens scale with developers.
- CI Auth Tokens should scale with team size and subscription tier.
If you have any questions about whether or not your current or preferred plan will meet these fairness definitions, please reach out to our team.
When usage exceeds fair use
If we see usage patterns that exceed the Fair Usage guidelines described above, we may reach out to better understand how LocalStack is being used.
In many cases, this simply means discussing how LocalStack fits into your development workflow and whether your current subscription tier still reflects your usage scale.
Depending on the situation, we may:
- ask for a brief overview of how LocalStack is being used in your development or automation environment;
- recommend adjusting how tokens are used across automation workflows;
- suggest moving to a subscription tier that better reflects the scale of usage;
- apply temporary limits to tokens in cases of high concurrency or activity that burdens our authentication infrastructure
LocalStack reserves its rights under your governing agreement in cases that may require or justify additional remedies (e.g., suspension and/or termination).
Our goal is always to work with teams to find a setup that fits both their workflow and the LocalStack pricing model.
