# Pricing

> Four rates, paid from prepaid credit. No monthly plan, no minimum spend. Worked examples and how billing works.

| What | Rate | Per hour |
|---|---|---|
| Encoding, `abr_basic` (several qualities for viewers) | $0.003 per minute | $0.18 per stream-hour |
| Passthrough (exactly what you send) | $0.0005 per minute | $0.03 per stream-hour |
| Delivery to viewers | $0.03 per GB | about $0.034 per viewer-hour at 720p, $0.014 at 480p |
| Recording storage | $0.03 per GB-month | about $0.034 per month for one hour of 720p |

Encoding and passthrough are counted per second of publishing. Delivery is what viewers actually download: a viewer on a weak connection who drops to 480p costs less. Downloading a recording counts as delivery. Nothing is charged for a stream that never goes live, for API calls, or for the hosted player.

`GET /v1/usage` returns these rates, your balance and your usage per day, so an agent or your backend can work out costs itself.

## Worked examples

Viewer-hours at 720p assume about 2.5 Mbps, or 1.125 GB per hour.

| Event | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| A 1-hour yoga class at 720p, 30 viewers, recorded and kept 30 days | $0.18 encoding + 30 × $0.034 delivery + $0.034 storage | **$1.23** |
| A 1-hour 720p event with 100 viewers | $0.18 + 100 × $0.034 | **$3.56** |
| A 2-hour town hall, 500 viewers at 720p | 2 × $0.18 + 1,000 × $0.034 | **$34.11** |
| An agent's 5-minute test, passthrough, 1 viewer | 5 × $0.0005 + 0.094 GB × $0.03 | **$0.005** |

## How billing works

- **Prepaid credit.** Creating a stream needs at least $1.00 of credit. During early access, credit is added by the JustOnAir team when your account is approved and on request.
- **Counted continuously, charged daily.** Delivery is read from the CDN's logs an hour at a time; each UTC day is charged once, about two hours after it ends. `cost` on a stream and `/v1/usage` show everything used so far, charged or not.
- **At zero, streams stop.** When credit left (balance minus usage not yet charged) reaches zero, live streams end with `end_reason: "insufficient_credit"`. After 7 days at zero, recordings are deleted.

## Why it stays simple

Many live video APIs add a monthly plan, a minimum spend, or charge several times more per encoded hour. JustOnAir has the four rates above and nothing else: no plan, no minimum, no charge for a stream that never goes live, and nothing extra for the hosted player or signed URLs.