Download quotas (daily limits per role) Pro

Access rules decide who can download a document. Quotas decide how much: FileDeck Pro can give each user role — and logged-out visitors — a daily download ceiling. Use it to stop bulk scraping of a public library, or to meter a members’ resource area.

FileDeck Pro — this feature is included in all Pro plans. See pricing

Set the limits

1. Go to Documents → Settings → Downloads.
2. Under Daily download limits, enter a number for any role you want to meter, and/or for Visitors (not logged in).
3. Leave a field blank for unlimited. Save changes.

How the limits behave

• Limits are per person per day (UTC). Logged-in users are counted by account; visitors are counted by IP address.
• A user with several roles gets the most permissive of them — if any of their roles is unmetered, they’re unlimited.
• Over the limit, the download is refused with a polite message: "You’ve reached today’s download limit (N). The limit resets tomorrow."
• Each file inside a multi-select zip counts against the quota, so a zip can’t be used to sidestep the limit — documents over the limit are left out of the archive.
• Signed share links are exempt, consistent with the rest of FileDeck: a share link you minted carries its own authorisation and expiry.

What quotas are (and aren’t) for

Quotas are a fairness and anti-scraping tool. They don’t replace access control — a document that shouldn’t be public should be restricted, not merely metered. FileDeck also applies its own per-IP request throttling underneath, independent of quotas.

Notes

• No new personal data is stored: counters are daily keys by user ID or a hash of the IP, and expire automatically.
• Developers can veto or allow any download with the filedeck_download_allowed filter (return true or a WP_Error).