The listing says unlimited. The footnote says 500 GB, then 2 Mbps. Or 200 GB, then a queue. You find the footnote after Claude Code has been retrying all afternoon and YouTube has been on in the other room.
In China that gap is not theoretical. You are not “light browsing.” You are pulling App Store binaries you cannot get on the local store, sitting in model chats, and opening Google properties that re-fetch the world on every navigation. A tourist on a 7-day trip can chew a small cap without meaning to. A resident doing real work will hit it on purpose.
Where the data goes
Model tools. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. Long contexts, file uploads, retries when the path resets. One flaky evening is a lot of repeated bytes.
Video you already pay for. YouTube and Netflix over a tunnel are not 50 MB. They are gigabytes if you leave a tab open.
Updates. Windows, Android, Xcode, a game launcher. The first night on hotel Wi-Fi is often “let everything update because I could not do it on the plane.”
Failed connections. A VPN that drops and retries is a data amplifier. You paid for the same file three times.
A cap turns all of that into a second product decision: buy more data, buy a second VPN, or turn it off and live with the filter. People on r/chinalifer describe that exact spiral when a cheap client starts shaping traffic.
What “unlimited” has to mean in writing
If the pricing page does not say it, it is not part of the deal. If the terms allow a silent throttle after a round number, you bought a throttle.
Qiao’s pricing page lists unlimited traffic on Voyager and Meridian. The Terms say the same: no monthly data cap, no overage fee. We still block BitTorrent and other P2P on every node. That is not a secret cap on browsing. It is a ban on seeding.
We can still suspend an account that breaks the Terms (abuse, fraud, illegal use). Ordinary personal use — work, mail, models, video — is what the plan is for.
Why a cap is worse in China than in a café
Outside China, when you hit a cap you switch to the raw connection and keep working. Inside China, the raw connection is the thing you bought the VPN to leave. Hitting a cap means you lost the product.
That is why we put unlimited on the checkout page, not only in a FAQ. You should see it while you are paying.
How to buy this without guessing
Voyager is two devices, every location, unlimited traffic, no-logs. Meridian is four devices plus Smart Flow, so the heavy tunnel use (models, YouTube, GitHub) does not drag WeChat with it.
Pay on the website with Alipay, WeChat Pay, or crypto. First paid purchase: 7 days to request a refund. After that the sale is final. The app’s first Meridian day does not take a card.
We do not store your browsing, DNS, or traffic. There is no hidden meter of “where you went.” There is also no traffic cap hiding behind that sentence.
Open pricing and read the line under the plans. If you want it in legal language, it is in the Terms.