How billing works
Your plan, the allowances every library shares, how usage is measured, and what happens when an allowance runs out.
Your account has one plan, one bill and one pay-as-you-go balance, shared by all of its libraries. This page explains what is measured and how.
Prices are coming soon
Final plan prices and rates aren't published yet. They will appear on the OctaVideo pricing page and in the console under Plans & pricing.
The three parts of your bill
- Base plan (required): a monthly plan with an allowance for each metric below. Create a library unlocks once a plan is active.
- Overage: usage past an allowance, charged at your plan's overage rate.
- Pay-as-you-go balance: prepaid credit that pays for overage, and for add-ons that aren't part of any plan at the list rate.
Allowances
Every plan includes these allowances each billing period. All libraries in the account draw from the same allowances; the User board shows how much of each is used.
| Allowance | How it's measured |
|---|---|
| Storage | The average GB stored over the month (GB-month): each video's source file plus every rendition encoded from it. |
| Bandwidth | The GB of video delivered to your viewers. |
| Encoding | Output minutes: for each rendition, the encoded duration rounded up to a whole minute. A 10-minute video encoded in 3 resolutions uses 30 minutes. |
| Transcribe | Minutes of video transcribed. |
| DRM licences | One per playback session that uses DRM. |
Each usage record is counted exactly once, even if a step is retried, so a retry never bills you twice.
What the statistics count
Statistics also report views, watch time, playback sessions and unique viewers. A unique viewer is one person: OctaVideo counts the user_id your server sends with each OTP, and falls back to one viewer per browser when there is none. See Secure playback.
When an allowance runs out
On Billing → When an allowance runs out, choose what happens once a metric reaches 100% of its allowance:
- Keep serving and charge overage from the pay-as-you-go balance, at your plan's overage rate.
- Charge overage up to a limit this period, then pause delivery: set the limit in Overage limit this period.
- Pause delivery at 100%: a hard stop; viewers see "temporarily unavailable" until the next period or a plan change.
If the balance reaches zero during overage, auto top-up runs if it's on; otherwise delivery pauses and you get an email. See Balance and invoices.
The choice is saved as soon as you make it. The User board shows a banner when a metric reaches its alert level, goes into overage or is paused.
Changing plan
Open Plans & pricing from Billing → Change plan:
- Upgrade starts now, prorated for the days left in the period.
- Downgrade starts at renewal; until then the header shows the scheduled change with Keep to undo it.
- A plan can't be smaller than what you already use, such as your number of libraries.
- Need more than the largest plan? Write to help@octavideo.tech.
Currency and country
Your billing country, set from your billing address, decides the currency of your invoices. If it looks wrong, ask for a review from Billing.
Issue a playback OTP POST
Issues a one-time password (OTP) that lets one viewer play one video, and returns the `embed_url` to load in an iframe. Call this from your server each time a signed-in viewer opens a video page, and never expose your library key to the browser. An OTP can be used once and expires after `ttl_seconds` (5 minutes by default). Always pass `user_id`: it makes one person count as one unique viewer across devices. The video must be `ready`, otherwise the response is `409` with the code `video_not_ready`.
Balance and invoices
Recharge the pay-as-you-go balance, turn on auto top-up and alerts, and download invoices.