Satellite Internet Cost Per Month With Fees

The satellite internet kit is delivered on a Tuesday. It sits in the garage through that weekend and the next, because the roof is wet and nobody wants to be up a ladder in that. Someone finally mounts it eleven days later. By then the first month has been charged, the refund window has been running for four days, and not one packet has crossed the link.

That is not a hypothetical. It is arithmetic out of the terms of service, and it is the first of several places where satellite internet costs something other than the number on the sales page.

Everything below was read on 8 September 2026 from the providers' own legal and support pages. Prices, plan names and clauses in this corner of the market change faster than almost anywhere else in home internet, so treat every figure here as a worked example of where to look, not as a quote for your address.

The refund clock starts before you climb the ladder

Starlink's US Terms of Service give you a genuinely generous return right. You may return an undamaged, untampered and unmodified Kit "within 30 days of the Payment Due Date for a full refund for any reason, including the inability to receive Services due to field-of-view issues." Return it in time and you also get back the first month's service fee, the Monthly Kit Access Fee where one applies, and the Demand Surcharge.

The trap is in the phrase Payment Due Date, which the same document defines separately. It is the earliest of three events: the date you activate the Kit, seven days after Starlink delivers it, or, if no delivery date is available, 30 days from the date it shipped. Delivery plus seven days is the clause that catches people. The box does not have to be opened for that clock to start.

So the useful reading of the return right is not "30 days to decide." Activate it the day it lands and the clock starts at activation, which buys you the full thirty days of working service to judge it on. Leave it boxed and the clock starts anyway on day seven, so every day the box stays shut is trial you have paid for and cannot use. Put a calendar entry on the Payment Due Date plus 30 days the same afternoon the tracking number resolves, and treat everything between those two dates as the only window in which walking away costs you nothing but the shipping, which the terms make non-refundable.

There is a second clock behind it. If you rented the Kit rather than bought it, cancellation obliges you to return the equipment within 30 days or be charged its full retail price. That is the same shape of problem as equipment return on a wireline account: the charge is not a penalty for cancelling, it is a penalty for a tracking number you cannot produce.

Three prices on the sales page, five plan names in the legal file

On 8 September 2026 Starlink's service plans page showed exactly three fixed residential options: Residential 100 Mbps at $55 a month, Residential 200 Mbps at $85, Residential Max at $130. The residential landing page rendered the same $55 under the words "service starting at," alongside a banner reading "No upfront hardware cost in select areas."

Both qualifiers matter. The footnote under those three prices says the 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps plans "are only available in select areas," which means the headline $55 is not a national price and may not exist at all at a rural address, which is the sort of address satellite is sold to. And "no upfront hardware cost" is not a discount. It is the trigger for a contract, which the next section takes apart.

Now open the Service Plan Descriptions, which the terms incorporate by reference. It defines five fixed residential plans, not three: Residential Max, Residential 200 Mbps, Residential 100 Mbps, Residential, and Residential Lite. The last two carry no price on the sales page because they are not currently sold there, but they are live contract terms for whoever is on them. Residential Lite is described as including "an unlimited amount of 'Deprioritized' data" that "is always deprioritized as compared to other Starlink Fixed Service Plans."

Then open the broadband labels page, which links five CSV files. The Residential label records a monthly price of 120, a single purchase fee of 349 for equipment plus shipping that "Varies By Location," typical download of 50-150 Mbps, typical upload of 5-25 Mbps, unlimited data, and typical latency of 25-50 ms in the continental US or 60-90 ms outside it. The Residential Lite label records 80 a month, equipment at 149, and typical download of 30-100 Mbps.

None of those numbers appears on the sales page. That is not an accusation. Labels attach to specific plans, and a lineup can change faster than the label file behind it. It is a reason not to argue from the wrong document. If you want to know what a plan costs, the checkout page for your address governs. If you want to know what a plan promised on the day you bought it, the label governs, and you should have saved a copy. That distinction is the whole subject of reading a broadband label properly.

One more detail in the CSV, because it tells you how much scrutiny these files get: in the United States label, the data allowance policy and privacy policy columns both point at document URLs carrying the region code for Argentina.

A label that says no contract, and terms that describe a twelve-month one

The Residential label states ContractReq: No, ContractTime: N/A, EarlyTerminationFee: 0. Read that on its own and satellite looks like the least entangling internet you can buy.

Section 1 of the terms of service tells a second story, and its opening sentence is the reconciliation: it "applies to your Order and Services if you selected a service commitment at checkout." Select one and you agree to "continuously subscribe to the Services specified in your Order for a minimum of 12 or 24 months," measured from the Payment Due Date. In exchange, "You will receive a free Kit in connection with the Service Commitment," which is what that "no upfront hardware cost" banner is offering.

During the Commitment Period, the terms say, "if you take any action to change the Services specified in the Order, a $249 or $325, as applicable, change fee will be immediately applied to your current payment method." The listed actions are broader than cancelling. They include changing to a different service plan, changing your service address, and transferring the service or Kit to another person. The fee also lands if you miss an invoice due date, and the terms reserve referral to a collection agency and reporting to a credit bureau for unpaid commitments.

Three consequences that a price comparison never shows you:

• Moving costs $249 or $325. Not a transfer fee for a truck roll, but a change fee for touching the order. Satellite is often bought precisely because someone is moving somewhere unserved, which makes this the likeliest clause to be triggered by the likeliest customer.
• Upgrading costs the same. If the network is congested at your address and you want the faster tier, that is "changing to a different service plan."
• Returning the Kit inside the trial window does not trigger it. The terms are explicit that exercising the return right means no change fee applies. Miss the window by a day and the choice becomes 12 or 24 months, or $249 to $325.

Two more clawbacks sit nearby in the same document. A Demand Surcharge is "a one-time additional charge depending on the location of your Service address, the Service Plan you choose, and the Starlink Kit model you select," and you may be charged it again if you later change address or plan. And Regional Savings, where offered, can be reversed: change your address or plan, or "fail to activate your Kit within 30 days of shipment," and you may be billed the original savings amount. That last one is the garage again.

None of this makes the label wrong. The label describes a plan bought at full hardware price with no commitment, and that plan really does have no contract and no termination fee. It simply is not the offer most people are shown at checkout. Before you order, screenshot the checkout page that names your commitment length, your hardware price and any surcharge, and file it with the label CSV.

Download the label file before 14 September 2026

This part is time-critical, and it applies to every provider rather than only to satellite.

Since 2024, 47 CFR 8.1(a)(3) has required broadband providers to publish their label contents "separately in a spreadsheet file format on their websites via a dedicated uniform resource locator (URL)." That rule is why the Starlink CSVs quoted above exist as files you can download rather than as pictures you have to squint at. Paragraph (a)(5) separately required providers to archive labels for at least two years after a plan stops being sold, and to hand an existing customer the archived label for their own plan within thirty days of a request.

Both requirements are being deleted. In Empowering Broadband Consumers Through Transparency, 91 FR 52251, published 13 August 2026 and effective 14 September 2026, the Commission states that it will "(6) eliminate the requirement that providers make label information available in machine readable database format; and (7) eliminate the requirement that providers archive labels for at least two years after a service is no longer offered to new customers." The same order allows a hyperlink or icon at the point of sale in place of displaying the full label.

The reasoning on archiving is worth reading, because it tells you whose job this becomes. Service agreements, billing statements and other records, the order says, "already provide much of the information relevant to resolving billing or service disputes." Translated into practice: the provider will no longer be obliged to keep the document that says what your plan promised, so you are.

Concretely, this week. Download the CSV for the plan you are on or considering, save the label page as a PDF showing the URL and the date, and keep both with your order confirmation. It takes about four minutes and it is the difference between a documented claim and a memory. After 14 September the file may simply stop being published, and nothing in the rules will require anyone to hand you the old one.

What "clear view of sky" means when the map draws a band you cannot clear

Satellite is the only home internet where the physical site survey is your job. Starlink's terms put it plainly: "You are responsible for the installation of the Starlink Kit in a location that has a clear field of view of the sky."

The tool for that is free, and you should use it before ordering rather than after. Starlink's support article on checking for obstructions says to go to the location you intend to use, open "Check for Obstructions" in the app, and scan the terminal's field of view with the camera, holding "the phone as close as possible to the height and perspective of Starlink." That last clause is the one people skip. A scan taken standing on the lawn does not describe a dish that will sit on a roof peak, and a scan from the roof peak does not describe the dish you are actually going to leave on a windowsill. Scan the spot you will genuinely use, then scan the fallback spot, and write down both results.

The company's own framing of obstructions is more forgiving than the folklore around it. Its obstructions explainer says a terminal in the United States has "10s of satellites in view," switches between them "many times per minute" in a way that is "generally imperceptible," and reacts to dynamic blockages "in a timescale of 10s to 100s of milliseconds." It also says the terminal measures uptime at 10 Hz and reports outages at the 100 ms level in the app, which makes the app a usable logging instrument rather than a status light.

Do not expect a perfect map, though. Starlink's obstruction map FAQ explains the thick empty band that shows up on everyone's: it is the geostationary exclusion zone, a strip of sky the terminal will not transmit through in order to avoid interfering with satellites parked over the equator. No amount of tree work fills it in. People have paid arborists over that band.

And the Starlink Specifications list "angle and/or field of view of the dish" and "weather" among the circumstances that may affect performance, alongside "proximity of other Starlink Kits" - a quiet acknowledgement that your neighbours' terminals are part of your install environment.

Latency here is two regulatory categories, not one number

The single technical fact that decides whether satellite can carry your work is latency, and the federal government has already drawn the line for you.

Under 47 CFR 54.309(a)(2)(v), which sets the public interest obligations attached to Connect America Fund Phase II support, bidders are "required to meet one of two latency performance levels." Low latency bidders must meet 95 percent or more of peak-period round-trip measurements "at or below 100 milliseconds." High-latency bidders must meet 95 percent or more "at or below 750 ms" and additionally demonstrate a voice Mean Opinion Score of four or higher. Those two numbers, 100 and 750, are not marketing. They are the boundary the Commission drew between a connection that carries interactive traffic and one that needs separate proof that phone calls work on it.

Low-Earth-orbit systems live in the first class. The Starlink label's typical latency of 25-50 ms in the continental US sits comfortably inside it, and the same label's note that the figure rises to 60-90 ms outside the continental US tells you how much orbit geometry costs. Geostationary systems fall on the far side of that line. With the spacecraft roughly 35,800 km up, the signal covers well over 140,000 km before the reply reaches you, so a round trip past half a second is a property of the distance rather than a defect a provider can patch.

What that means in the room: a page loads, a file downloads, a stream buffers and plays. A conversation does not survive it. Half a second of round-trip delay turns every interruption into a collision, and the numbers that actually break a call, jitter and loss on top of that baseline, are measured separately and behave differently. Before signing anything with a geostationary provider for work that involves live meetings, run a week of loaded-latency samples during the trial and look at the ninety-fifth percentile rather than the average.

Rain fade you can see, and the outage happening in another state

Weather is the part everyone asks about and nearly everyone frames wrongly.

The physics is old and standardised. The ITU's Recommendation ITU-R P.618, currently at revision 14, approved in August 2023, is the international model for predicting rain attenuation on Earth-to-space paths, and attenuation rises steeply with frequency. That is why the band a system uses is a weather fact and not a trivia fact. Viasat describes its own fleet as "high-speed, high-capacity Ka-band satellites," and Ka sits well above the 12.2-12.7 GHz band named in the FCC authorisation notice on Starlink's specifications page - though that notice covers in-motion operations rather than the fixed residential service, so treat it as an indication of where Starlink operates and not as a specification of your dish.

Viasat, the one geostationary operator whose pages are quoted throughout this article, describes the practical effect more usefully than any chart. Its support page on weather affecting service says cloud cover and light snow or rain should not interrupt the connection, that "a very severe thundershower or heavy snowstorm may cause a temporary connection loss," that service returns without any action from you, and that "typically, these outages don't last more than 20 minutes, even if it continues to rain or snow for longer than that." The same page notes that reception can be affected by snow and ice accumulating on the antenna, which you may wipe off if the dish is safely reachable.

Then comes the sentence that ends most home diagnosis: "Your service may have a weather outage even though you see clear skies." Your traffic passes through a large gateway that is "typically located far from your house," often in another state, and weather there can take you down under a cloudless sky. Viasat is careful about the size of this: gateway outages are "rare" because those sites use much larger antennas, and when they happen the outage is "typically brief." Rare is not the same as diagnosable, though, and that is the point for you - it is the one failure mode you can neither confirm nor rule out from your own window. Starlink's marketing runs the other way, describing hardware "engineered to melt snow and withstand sleet, heavy rain, and harsh winds," while its specifications list weather among the general exclusions from expected performance. Both can be true at once. The hardware surviving a storm and the link surviving a storm are different claims.

The upshot is that you cannot troubleshoot weather by looking out of the window. What you can do is log. Run a timestamped ping to a fixed target in a side window through storm season, keep the app's outage list, and after four weeks you will know whether your interruptions cluster with local weather, with a distant gateway, or with the evening rush. Those are three problems with three different answers.

Building the monthly number that will actually appear on your card

Here is the ledger to fill in before you order, in the order the charges arrive. Every line is a question you can answer from the provider's own pages in one sitting.

One-time, at order:

• Hardware or Kit price, or zero if you are taking the free-Kit commitment. Write down which, and if it is free, write down the commitment length.
• Shipping and handling. Starlink's label records this as "Varies By Location," and its terms state that shipping and handling charges are non-refundable.
• Demand Surcharge, if the checkout page shows one for your address, plan and Kit model.
• Professional installation, if you are not doing it yourself. Starlink's residential page lists free professional home installation under the 200 Mbps and Max tiers only; Viasat's label explainer shows an installation fee that "will vary based on your location and credit status."

Every month:

• The plan price your address returned, not the "starting at" figure.
• Equipment lease, if the provider rents rather than sells. Viasat's broadband label explainer shows a Monthly Lease Fee of $15 a month, with a one-time Lifetime Lease Fee of $250 as the alternative, which puts the break-even on that choice under 17 months.
• Provider-invented surcharges. The same Viasat page lists an Administrative Cost Recovery Fee, and it rewards close reading: the fee table gives $3.49 while the explanatory paragraph below it describes "a monthly $1.23 surcharge." Whichever governs your account, the page itself says the charge "is not a tax or government charge," which puts it in the same family as the cost-recovery line items on wireline bills.
• Taxes, which no provider quotes in the headline.

Conditional, but plan for it:

• The change fee if you move, upgrade, downgrade or transfer during a commitment period. On Starlink's terms, $249 or $325.
• Data-policy consequences rather than data charges. Viasat's explainer states there is no fee for exceeding a data limit, but that a household "trending to exceed 850 GBs in any 30-day period" may be given reduced priority during congestion. Starlink's Fair Use Policy publishes no household threshold at all; it reserves the right to reduce speeds for some or all users to mitigate congestion and points to the plan descriptions for how data is prioritised. On both networks the ceiling is a priority position, not a bill.

Multiply the monthly total by 12 and by 24, add the one-time lines, and compare that against the commitment you are being asked to sign. Then note the administrative detail that makes auditing harder than it looks: Starlink's terms say bills "are provided to customers on a monthly basis only through the Starlink Customer Portal." No envelope, no emailed statement. If nobody logs in, nobody sees the charge, which is how a Demand Surcharge or a reversed regional saving goes unnoticed for a year.

If the answer at your address turns out to be no, or the numbers stop making sense, the sequence for working out what else reaches the property is the order to try things at an address nobody wants to serve, and the capacity-versus-coverage problem behind a fixed wireless refusal is a different gate entirely.

Start with the four-minute job while it is still available. Download the label CSV for the plan you are looking at, save the checkout page as a PDF with the URL and today's date visible, and put the Payment Due Date plus 30 days into your calendar the moment a tracking number appears.