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Billed volume vs delivered volume

Billed volume and delivered volume are not the same thing, and the gap can exceed 100×. Billed volume is the size of the complete source file at 720p, or the bytes that land in your storage — whichever is larger. Delivered volume is only the second of those. You are billed on billed volume. Why: a job gives you access to the whole source. Whether you keep all of it, a 10-second clip of it, or only its audio track does not change what the job costs to serve — so it does not change what it bills. Rule, in one line:
Three terms, and only three. The quality you request does not raise the bill on its own — it only shows up through the bytes actually delivered. A 1080p or 4K request that downloads the whole file bills those real bytes; a 1080p request that only keeps a 10-second clip bills the 720p weight of the source, exactly like a 360p one. The 1 MB per-job minimum is the third term: any job billing under 1 MB is rounded up to 1 MB. Quick estimator (real sizes vary with content; these bounds hold for typical video): A 10-minute source bills at least ≈ 0.09 GB — even if you request 10 seconds of it, at 360p, audio only. Exceptions where billed = delivered, exactly: Spotify and social-media sources, and live-stream recordings.

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Clipping bills the full source

clip_start / clip_end trim the output, not the bill. A clip bills the complete source video at 720p, whatever quality it was cut from. The arithmetic, explicitly:
Cutting many clips from the same source multiplies this: each job bills the full source independently. 10 clips from one 2-hour video = 10 × 1.04 GB = 10.4 GB billed, for a few MB delivered.

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The 720p metering floor

We never meter below 720p. Whatever you request, the billed volume of a job is never less than the complete source at 720p:
  • A 360p request bills the source’s 720p volume.
  • A 144p request bills the source’s 720p volume.
  • An audio-only request bills the source’s 720p volume. Yes — audio too. A 1-hour podcast episode delivered as a 55 MB m4a bills ≈ 0.52 GB.
Requesting above 720p does not raise the bill by itself — you pay for the bytes you actually receive, and only when they exceed the 720p weight (a full 1080p or 4K download does; a clip cut from one does not). Requesting below it never discounts. The floor is negotiable on paid plans — contact us.

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Free allowance and trials

There are two distinct free tiers. Know which one you are on: Free trial (no card on file). Metered on billed volume, not delivered volume. When the limit is reached, jobs are refused — a hard stop. Trial accounts are never charged: no card exists, no overage is possible. Pay-as-you-go free allowance: 100 GB (one per organization, requires a card at activation). Also metered on billed volume. Concretely: 100 GB of allowance is ≈ 1,000 ten-minute videos at the 720p floor — not 100 GB of delivered files. When the allowance is exhausted, your account continues without interruption and billable usage begins immediately at $1.00/GB, charged automatically to your card. If you want a hard stop instead, stay on the trial or ask us to cap your account.

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Worked examples

All costs at $1.00 per GB of billed volume (decimal GB, billed per MB, rounded up to the next MB). This table is the contract — if your mental model disagrees with a row, your bill will surprise you. Row 2 is a real incident, anonymized: a customer cut 70,000 short clips at 360p, received 60 GB of files, and accrued a ≈ $7,500 bill — 125× the delivered volume. Rows 1 and 2 are why this page exists. If your workload cuts clips at scale, estimate with rows 1–2, never with your delivered bytes. Rows 5–6: at or above 720p with the full video delivered, billed ≈ delivered — no surprise for whole-file workloads. Compare rows 1 and 6: both requested high quality from a 2-hour source, but row 6 kept the whole file and pays for it, while row 1 kept 10 seconds and pays the 720p floor.

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Reading your usage

Your dashboard’s Billing page shows two numbers, side by side:
  • Data transferred — delivered volume (what landed in your storage).
  • Billable usage — billed volume (what you pay on). Always ≥ delivered.
Both update when a job completes (seconds, not hours). Dashboard pages cache for up to 2 minutes — that is the maximum lag between a completed job and the number on screen. The daily chart buckets by UTC calendar day; the current day fills in as jobs complete. The per-key view on the API Keys page shows delivered volume with billed volume alongside (billed X GB) whenever they differ. If the two figures ever diverge from your own accounting by more than one in-flight job, contact support with the job IDs — do not wait for the invoice.

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Usage alerts

You receive an email when your billed usage crosses 50 %, 80 % and 100 % of your trial, allowance, or plan volume. Alerts are on by default for every account with a volume limit and are sent to your organization owner’s email address. Thresholds are checked every 5 minutes — the maximum delay between crossing a threshold and the email. The 100 % email states exactly what happens next for your account type: hard stop (trial), automatic billing at $1.00/GB (pay-as-you-go allowance), or overage at your plan rate. If your volume limit changes, all thresholds re-arm against the new limit.

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Plans, overage, and payment terms

Pay-as-you-go: 1.00perGBofbilledvolume.Nomonthlyfee,novolumecommitment.Evaluated∗∗daily∗∗;aninvoiceisissuedwhenyourunbilledbalancereaches1.00 per GB of billed volume. No monthly fee, no volume commitment. Evaluated **daily**; an invoice is issued when your unbilled balance reaches 10, and in any event on the last day of each calendar month. Each invoice is charged automatically to the card on file. Volume plans: monthly tiers with included billed volume and lower per-GB rates, from roughly $0.10–0.15 per GB at multi-TB volume. Overage on a plan is billed at your plan’s per-GB rate, metered identically to pay-as-you-go. Late payment: if the automatic charge fails, we retry and notify you by email. If payment still fails, your account is suspended — jobs are refused until the balance is settled. We never debit beyond the invoiced amount, and suspension never deletes your delivered files.

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Metering change policy

Any change to how usage is metered — the floor, the clipping rule, the billed-volume definition, rounding — is:
  1. announced by email to every affected account at least 30 days before it takes effect,
  2. recorded in the public changelog with before/after examples,
  3. never retroactive: usage already accrued is billed under the rules in force when it accrued.
Price changes (the per-GB rate) follow the same policy.