Billing Overview

VMRack Transcoder adopts a simple and transparent Pay-As-You-Go billing model, combined with monthly free quotas, making every penny of your investment clearly visible. This chapter helps you understand the billing logic through practical cases.

Billing Model

PayAsYouGo: No upfront fees. The system generates bills based on your actual transcoding duration, output specifications, and snapshot count, automatically deducting from your account credit.

Hourly Bill Settlement: The billing cycle is 1 hour. The system settles all transcoding task fees completed in the previous hour (09:00:00-09:59:59) at every hour on the dot (e.g., 10:00:00).

• Billing Precision: The bill amount generated by the system per hour is accurate to 4 decimal places (e.g., $0.5188).

• Actual Payment: Fee deduction is executed only to 2 decimal places (i.e., "cents").

• Unsettled Amount: The 3rd and 4th decimal places in the bill (parts less than 1 cent) are not deducted temporarily but automatically enter your monthly unsettled balance.

Monthly Unified Settlement: The system summarizes all "unsettled amounts" from the previous month on the 1st of each month.

• Summary Calculation: Adds up the unsettled remainders (3rd and 4th decimal places) generated from all hourly bills in the previous month.

• Final Deduction: The summarized total amount is kept to 2 decimal places again for a one-time deduction.

• Waived Amount: If the summarized total remainder is still less than $0.01, the system will directly waive (write off) this fee, and you do not need to pay it.

Billing Rules

Transcoder fees consist of two parts: video transcoding fees and video snapshot fees. To standardize billing, we implement the following rules:

• Transcoding Duration: Any duration less than 1 minute is calculated as 1 minute.

• Snapshot Count: Any quantity less than 1000 images is calculated as 1000 images (1 unit).

Free Tier

To reduce trial costs for users, VMRack provides monthly Free Tier benefits for all users.

• Refresh Mechanism: Free Tier automatically refreshes at 0:00 on the 1st of each natural month. Unused Free Tier cannot be rolled over to the next month.

Deduction Rule: Priority deduction of Free Tier during settlement; billing starts only for the excess part.

Pricing Details

Audio and video transcoding fees are calculated based on the output codec, resolution, transcoding duration, and snapshot count.

• Billing Formula: Video Transcoding Fee = Video Transcoding Output File Duration (Minutes) × Transcoding Unit Price of Corresponding Codec/Resolution ($/Minute) + Video Snapshot Count / 1000 × Snapshot Unit Price ($/Thousand).

• Settlement Rule: During the billing cycle settlement, the total duration of transcoding output files in the previous hour is converted into minutes and rounded up (duration less than 1 minute is calculated as 1 minute); video snapshots less than 1000 are calculated as 1000 (1 unit).

Billing Examples

To help you better understand the billing logic of Transcoder, we simulate a user (User A) who enables the service on January 1st.

Scenario Setup

• User Benefits: Has complete Monthly Free Tier for the current month (200 minutes transcoding, 1000 snapshots).

• Transcoding Specs: H.264 Codec, Normal Transcoding, HD (1280x720).

• Transcoding Unit Price: $0.0005 / Minute (Example price, subject to system actuals; less than 1 minute is calculated as 1 minute).

• Snapshot Unit Price: $0.0110 / Thousand (Example price, subject to system actuals; less than 1000 is calculated as 1000).

Usage Record User A performed the following operations on the morning of January 1st:

• 09:00 ~ 09:59: Processed video, duration 46m 20s, 200 snapshots.

• 10:00 ~ 10:59: Processed video, duration 154m 50s, 900 snapshots.

• 11:00 ~ 11:59: Processed video, duration 10m 55s, 1700 snapshots.

Fee Breakdown

Bill Analysis

Monthly Settlement

Assuming User A has no other transactions this month, on the 1st of the next month, the system will process the accumulated unsettled balance:

• Summarize Unsettled Balance: $0.0060 +$ 0.0055 = $ 0.0115.

• Actual Payment: The summarized total exceeds 1 cent, system deducts $ 0.01.

• Waived Amount: The remaining remainder $ 0.0015 is directly waived, no payment needed.

Note: The above costs are example data. Please refer to the system for actual unit prices!

Bill Inquiry

Bills are typically generated one hour after the end of the current billing cycle. The specific issuance time is subject to system processing. Inquiry method:

• Log in to the console, pull down the Avatar menu in the top right, and select Billing.

• In the left navigation bar, select Pay-As-You-Go Bill to view detailed statements and billing charges.

Insufficient Account Credit Warning

When the account credit is less than $20.00, the platform will send message and email notifications to remind you. To avoid service unavailability caused by arrears, please pay attention to the account credit consumption and ensure sufficient account credit.
On the Account Credit page, you can configure the alert settings and threshold for credit warnings.

Arrears & Suspension Instructions

Please pay close attention to your account credit status to avoid arrears affecting your business.

Arrears Trigger:

When the system detects that your account credit is insufficient to pay the current bill (Account Credit < 0), the service will enter the arrears state.

Service Suspension Handling:

• You will be unable to access relevant pages of the Transcoder Console.

• Tasks currently in progress will continue to execute until completion; tasks currently in the queue will stop execution.

Service Recovery:

• After you recharge and settle the arrears (i.e., Account Credit is restored to a positive number), the system will automatically recover the Transcoder service that was stopped due to arrears.

• You can re-enter the Transcoder Console for management operations.