Question 1

How is transcoding billed?

Accepted Answer

Per minute of output video, rounded to the nearest second.

Question 2

What counts as "output"?

Accepted Answer

Each rendition counts separately. A 10-minute video encoded into 3 HLS renditions = 30 minutes of output.

Question 3

Do I pay for audio tracks?

Accepted Answer

No. Audio encoding and multi-language tracks are free.

Question 4

Do I pay for failed jobs?

Accepted Answer

No. A failed job bills €0 — the outputs, the processing fee, all of it. Charging for failure would be a bold business model.

Question 5

Is there a monthly minimum?

Accepted Answer

No. No monthly fees and no commitments.

Question 6

What is the processing fee?

Accepted Answer

Every job an encoder starts carries one flat processing fee, scaled to the job's size class — currently S/M €0.05, L €0.25, XL €0.50. It pays for starting a dedicated encoder: a machine sized to the renditions you asked for runs your job and nothing else until it finishes. The fee is added to what your renditions bill; it never clamps or replaces them, and it appears as its own "Processing fee" line on the job's cost breakdown. These are the current rates — the pricing page always publishes what is charged today.

Question 7

What happens if I cancel a job?

Accepted Answer

Canceling a job that is still queued costs nothing at all. Once an encoder has picked your job up, canceling bills the processing fee plus any outputs that completed before you canceled — the machine was already running. Declining a delayed-start job after its probe also bills the processing fee, because the probe ran on real hardware.

Question 8

Is there a per-job minimum?

Accepted Answer

No. New jobs have no minimum charge — you pay the processing fee plus what you actually produced. Jobs created before August 2026 were billed under a per-job minimum charge, and those jobs keep the terms they were created under; you can still see that line on their cost breakdowns.

Question 9

What currency are prices in?

Accepted Answer

All prices are in EUR and include VAT for consumers (EU businesses with a valid VAT ID are charged net of VAT).

Question 10

Who processes payments and when am I invoiced?

Accepted Answer

Payment is processed by Polar, our merchant of record, and usage is invoiced monthly in arrears at the end of each calendar month.

Question 11

Do you offer volume discounts?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Contact us if you process more than 10,000 minutes per month.

Question 12

How do add-on features affect pricing?

Accepted Answer

Each add-on feature applies a multiplier to the base price. Multipliers stack multiplicatively. For example, enabling DRM (1.25x) and per-title encoding (1.50x) results in a combined 1.875x multiplier on top of your codec, resolution, quality, and framerate pricing.

Question 13

How much do AI captions cost?

Accepted Answer

AI captions are €0.05 per minute of source video. Unlike the encoding add-ons, this is an additive fee, not a multiplier: the audio is transcribed once per job regardless of how many renditions you produce, and the charge is added on top of your encode cost. It appears as a separate fees line item on the job, additive to the processing fee — the two are separate services and neither absorbs the other. Captions are billed only when a caption file was actually delivered.

Question 14

How is video hosting billed?

Accepted Answer

Three line items: €0.010/min for encoding (one-time per video), €0.020/GB/month for storage (metered daily), and €0.010/GB for egress (metered hourly). No monthly fees or commitments.

Question 15

Do I pay egress for private videos?

Accepted Answer

Yes — egress is metered on all delivered bytes regardless of visibility. Private videos stay off the public player and embed; their playback URLs come back only on your authenticated API reads, signed and time-limited, so a raw CDN link will not serve them.

Question 16

Is hosting storage prorated?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Storage is metered daily against average bytes stored, so uploading or deleting mid-month only charges for the portion of the month the bytes existed.

Question 17

Can I use hosting without the transcoding API?

Accepted Answer

Hosting uses the transcoding engine under the hood, so every uploaded video is transcoded into the renditions your app config specifies. If you want to skip hosting and keep your own storage + CDN, use the transcoding API directly.

Codec	480p	720p	1080p	1440p	4K
H.264/AVC Widely compatible, fast	€0.005 /min	€0.0075 /min	€0.01 /min	€0.02 /min	€0.04 /min
H.265/HEVC 50% better compression	€0.005 /min	€0.0075 /min	€0.01 /min	€0.02 /min	€0.04 /min
VP9 Open format, YouTube std	€0.0075 /min	€0.0113 /min	€0.015 /min	€0.03 /min	€0.06 /min
AV1 Best compression, royalty-free	€0.02 /min	€0.03 /min	€0.04 /min	€0.08 /min	€0.16 /min

Framerate
24 fps 0.8x 25 fps 0.8333x 30 fps 1x 50 fps 1.6667x 60 fps 2x 120 fps 4x
Add-ons — optional, per job, off by default
	DRM Widevine, PlayReady & FairPlay content protection	1.25x
	HDR tone mapping HDR→SDR conversion. Not currently purchasable — refused at job creation.	1.5x
	Dolby Vision Dolby Vision processing via libdovi	2x
	Per-title encoding VMAF-targeted CRF search tuned to each source. Charged only when a search actually chose the CRF, and it needs an encoded window of at least 120 seconds.	1.5x
	Auto ABR ladder Content analysis + automatic bitrate ladder. Not currently purchasable — rejected at job creation.	1.75x
	Overlay (watermark / subtitle burn-in) Any pixel-burning overlay — a logo watermark or burned-in subtitles — requires a video re-render. Billed once per output: a watermark and burned-in subtitles together are still 1.1x, never 1.21x.	1.1x
Added, not multiplied
	Processing fee One flat fee per job an encoder starts — the price of a dedicated machine sized to your renditions, added to what they bill and shown as its own line on the job's cost breakdown. Small (S): up to 4 vcpu — single renditions and short ladders. Medium (M): up to 16 vcpu — the common multi-rendition ladder. Large (L): dedicated cores — memory-heavy work. Extra Large (XL): widest dedicated box — sustained 4k and hdr.	S/M €0.05, L €0.25, XL €0.50 / job
	AI captions Automatic captions from the audio track. Transcribed once per job whatever your ladder, and billed only when a caption file was actually delivered.	€0.05 / source min

Pricing is just multiplication.

Transcoding pricing

The multipliers

Video Hosting pricing

Frequently asked questions

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