The bandwidth cap feature is good for this but to work correctly it will need a start and stop time each day for free data, and if the carriers or other ISPs follow and bring back their old nights and weekends a way to specify some days as start and stop at 00:00 and 23:59 or butting up against the next off-peak tier would be required.
So, the suggestion is on the details button for each connection on the dashboard under the “Bandwidth Allowance Monitor” section you can enable the monitor, next have another box that says Time of Use, and a drop down that says free or reduced price, if the box isn’t checked don’t present these and behave as it does today. If checked and free give more weight to that connection during the free time, if reduced compare it to the other connections to see if they’re over-limit or free. On the counter for InControl show total and limited consumption. Use the same allowance controls for the soft/hard cap.
Some of this is much harder to implement than just accommodating Starlink’s program so rolling in bits as they’re ready is plenty fine vs waiting for a perfect free nights and weekends solution to roll out as they’re first and biggest today but there’s no way a few carriers don’t steal this scheme with their own take on it like their rollover minutes and free nights and weekends.
Currently Starlink has a 1TB soft-cap on data consumed between 23:00 and 07:00 being free for residential and Business customers, after this is reached residential customers are de-prioritized, business customers become limited to 1 mbps down / 1 mbps up. Being able to have the system both track roughly what it did for transfers, and moving the priority up and down relative to the other connections would save a ton of manual effort. Customers can get back on priority for a significant fee, so if they do this the router should be extra stingy with the data if the customer doesn’t elect to move them to backup status when swiping the credit card for that second hit if there are other connections at the same priority level.
Edit missed some words making the free data period reverse of actual.