Account sharing is not allowed (sharing access to your account with another person). Macros, VPNs and Auto-Clickers are also not allowed (for reasons explained in red towards the end of this article).
Cloud infrastructure providers used by Stim.io don’t allow Torrenting, Crypto Mining, or Play To Earn (e.g Crypto/NFT) games. Those activities are not allowed in the Stim.io Cloud PC or Stim Social.
While Pay As You Go sessions have no usage limits, subscriptions have the following limits:
- A max session of 8 hours using the Cloud PC. For example after 8 hours of gaming, your cloud PC will give a warning, then shutdown. You can immediately turn it back on and keep playing.
- An idle timeout of 20 minutes. After you are idle for 20 minutes, your Cloud PC may shutdown. You can turn it back on and resume playing.
- A CAPTCHA may appear at any time if our AI thinks you are not human.
Your same cloud PC can be switched between subscription mode and Pay As You Go. Subscribers also get 30% off on pay as you go. This is ideal for subscribers which occasionally want to run their Cloud PC in Pay As You Go mode. For example, if someone wants to use VR, Parsec, Steam Remote Play, or run a long download without captchas or an idle timeout.
There are no limits when using Pay As You Go (which consume Stim-Bucks per minute) and subscribers get 30% off when using Pay As You Go. The same Cloud PC can be started via Pay As You Go, or via a subscription performance level. Just select your subscription Cloud PC, then Pay As You Go on the left.
Your Cloud PC start time may vary between 1-15 minutes depending on how much storage you have used and how actively you start that specific Cloud PC in the selected region.
Why are there limits in the first place?
To be honest, stim.io can't survive as a business without our migration AI and limits all of which reduce cost.
The 20 minute idle timeout helps us cleanup inactive user sessions to save money so we are not paying cloud providers like AWS for something you aren't actively using.
Macros, VPNs, and Auto-Clickers are not allowed because they are often used as a way to attempt to bypass our idle timeout and or cheat in games. They also are (almost always) against the EULA of most PC games which gets our Public IPs banned and prevents other Stim users from enjoying those games. For these reasons, we detect and ban people who use them.
The 8 hour max session limit allows us to move your cloud PC every 8 hours to the best server in your selected region with the least people using it so we can save money. It also allows us to update servers when needed. The performance remains the same. You can instantly start your session again, but your cloud PC may now be running on a different physical server, with identical performance, in the same region.
Note: We use AI to determine how to migrate your Cloud PC storage across different regions and storage tiers depending on where and when they are most likely to be active
Your Cloud PC storage is (globally) cached across regions in which you are the most active. You can start your existing Cloud PC in any region globally and all of your games will be there. Your Cloud PC start time may vary between 1-15 minutes depending on how much storage you have used and how actively you start that specific Cloud PC in the selected region.
How Does Stim Determine Pricing?
Without Stim, the average user would pay at least $100-$800 per month after AWS fees EC2 + EBS SSD Storage + Windows Licenses + Bandwidth in all aws regions (more info below):
Every 128GB of SSD (EBS) Storage costs over $30/month in AWS fees to us in the cheapest region. In addition to storage costs, Stim.io typically runs your Cloud PC on AWS EC2 which has public pricing of at least $1.12/hr per running performance level 2 cloud PC (rounded up to the nearest hour). That would be over $811/month per user if we didn't stop idle Cloud PCs, and likely over $100/month even if you did stop your Cloud PC whenever you weren't using it. Performance level 3 on EC2 can be double this hourly cost. All of that doesn't include streaming outbound bandwidth, which typically increases that cost by 30%.
Source: (EC2, Windows, G4DN.2xlarge): https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/) - Be sure to select Windows + G4DN.2xLarge. Note: This does not include EBS Storage Costs or Bandwidth Costs.
Note: Stim.io is able to obtain volume discounts from AWS far below the above public AWS cost but it's still very expensive. We can't survive if we don't load balance and shutdown inactive cloud PCs.