Why our Starlink report form never asks for your street address

Our report form never asks for your street address because we don’t need it and holding it would put you at risk. Starlink sets the surcharge by service address and plan, and only Starlink’s checkout can quote your address. What this site answers is a different question, what’s typical in your county, and a county is precise enough to answer it while being far too large to point to anyone’s home. So the form takes your state and county, and optionally the first three digits of your ZIP code, and nothing more precise.

The same reasoning rules out screenshots, free text, logins and stored IP addresses. This page explains each choice and the trade-offs we accepted by making it.

How precise each level is

Why county

Counties are the smallest area we publish. They’re large enough that a county-level summary doesn’t point to a household, and they’re standard: the Census Bureau treats counties and their equivalents (parishes in Louisiana, boroughs and census areas in Alaska) as the primary divisions of each state, with fixed codes, so data from different sources lines up. They also match how people already talk about local conditions (“what are people in my county seeing?”).

Why only three ZIP digits

Some counties are huge. A ZIP prefix helps spot differences inside them without getting personal. The form refuses anything but exactly three digits (“Use only the first 3 digits of your ZIP code, or leave it blank”), so a full ZIP can’t slip in. ZIP3 stays in the raw data and is never published below county level.

What we never collect

• No street address, GPS or precise location. See above.
• No name, email, phone or Starlink account number. We don’t need to contact you, so we don’t ask.
• No screenshots. A checkout screenshot is the most natural evidence of a surcharge, and it usually shows the service address. The form accepts no files.
• No free text. A comment box is where people paste addresses, account numbers and names. There isn’t one.
• No IP address or browser details with a report, no cookies, no login. To stop one person flooding a county, the server makes a one-way hash of a secret salt, the date and your IP, and counts reports against it for 24 hours. The hash is stored apart from reports, deleted automatically, and can’t be turned back into an IP or linked to what you reported.
• Nothing to SpaceX. Reports are used only for published county totals and the open dataset. We don’t sell or share raw reports.

The form also refuses unknown fields: the server accepts only the listed fields and rejects anything else.

Why not collect addresses and protect them?

Because the safest data is data you never hold. Three reasons it wouldn’t help anyway:

1. We couldn’t give you a better answer. Starlink’s surcharge article says the fee “is determined by: your service address; the service plan selected.” The only system that can turn your address into a quote is Starlink’s checkout. An address in our database would give us nothing to tell you that your own checkout doesn’t.
2. Publishing would still be at county level. Anything finer could point to a household, so an address would be collected only to be thrown away.
3. Breaches and requests. Data that isn’t stored can’t leak, be subpoenaed or be misused.

The trade-offs we accept

Starlink also says service “is only guaranteed at the service address listed on your account,” and that’s another reason the address belongs between you and Starlink, not with us.

Worked example: what one report looks like

A hypothetical reader in a large western county reactivates a dish and sees a surcharge. Their report, exactly as stored:

That’s the whole record. Nothing in it identifies the reader, and nothing is lost for the purpose of a county median. How it moves from here to a published number is in how the dataset is built.

If you need an address-level answer

• Surcharge: start an order on starlink.com with your real address and plan, and stop at the summary (how).
• Availability: Starlink’s availability map (how to read it).
• Your account: Starlink support. Starlink’s surcharge article says that if you believe you were charged incorrectly, “please create a ticket for further review.”

What county-level data can and can’t answer

Sharing your quote elsewhere, safely

If you post about a surcharge in a forum or social group, the same logic protects you:

• Crop or retype instead of screenshotting. Checkout screens usually show the service address.
• Name the county, not the street. It’s enough for others to compare.
• Leave out account numbers and order IDs.
• Add the date and plan. Without them, a quote can’t be compared with anyone else’s.

Why Starlink needs your address and we don’t

Starlink and this site have opposite jobs, so they need opposite data.

Your address belongs in one place: your Starlink account. Everything we publish is built so that it never needs to be anywhere else.

Why county, not city or town

Cities might seem more natural, but they make poor reporting units for Starlink. Many of the households most interested in satellite internet live outside any city limits, in unincorporated areas that have no city to choose. City boundaries also change and overlap with ZIP codes in confusing ways. Every US address is in a county or county equivalent, the lists are fixed, and the Census Bureau’s county codes let our data line up with other public datasets. A county is also large enough that publishing its median doesn’t expose anyone.

What we don’t know

• Whether county is always coarse enough. In very small-population counties, even county-level data plus other details could narrow things. That’s one reason we publish only medians and ranges at n ≥ 5, never individual reports.
• How much accuracy we lose by not having addresses. We can’t measure it without the data we chose not to collect.

Common misunderstandings

• “A free site that doesn’t ask for my email must be selling something else.” We collect no identifiers to sell. How the site is funded is on how we make money.
• “No address means the data is useless.” It means the data answers county questions honestly. It was never meant to be your quote.

What to do next

1. Read the full list on the method page and the privacy page.
2. See how a county gets published.
3. Add your report. It takes about two minutes.