Looking is free. Acting is not.

Your own address, an address lookup and a DNS query cost nothing and are not a trial. What the plan buys is the half that spends our egress and carries real obligations.

Where the gate is, and why there

Every other site on the internet answers "what is my ip" for free, and charging for it would gate the step before the one worth paying for. Scanning a host and pulling a thousand pages are different in kind: they cost us bandwidth, they carry legal weight, and the people who want them buy tools.

The quota is also the safety bound

A scan allowance is the ceiling on how much damage one account can do with our outbound address before anybody looks at it. That is why it is a finite number at every tier including the top one — no amount of subscription revenue buys past the point where our address gets blocklisted.

Questions

Why do I have to sign in to run a scan?

Because an abuse report has to reach somebody. A scan that cannot be attributed to an account cannot be answered for, cannot be rate-limited meaningfully, and cannot be stopped by suspending anything. There is deliberately no anonymous allowance.

Is port scanning legal?

It depends where you and the target are, and scanning a host you are not authorised to test is unlawful in many jurisdictions regardless of intent. That is why scanning here needs an account and a per-scan statement that you are authorised to test that target — and why every scan is logged against the account that ran it.