Billing & Pricing
Paid plans are rated from metered usage. Prepaid balances are deducted as usage is reported; postpaid invoices are drafted for the active billing period. API request rate limits still apply for abuse protection.
What You Pay For
Section titled “What You Pay For”Paid tiers use resource-based billing:
| Resource | What It Measures |
|---|---|
| Delivered Minutes | Total viewer playback time |
| Cold Storage | Time-weighted durable storage |
The public beta catalog currently prices delivered minutes and cold storage. The billing engine is meter-based, so invoices can also carry separate line items for bandwidth, hot storage, processing formats, marketplace cluster rates, or advanced jobs when those meters are enabled for a tier or cluster.
Free Tier
Section titled “Free Tier”Access to the shared Free service with the included allowances below. API request limits still apply.
Included:
- 10,000 delivered minutes/month (zero-priced overage — Free never produces a bill)
- 10 GB of stored content (durable writes rejected at cap)
- 7-day recording retention
- Shared cluster access
- Livepeer-backed transcoding
- Analytics dashboard
- API access
Fair-use enforcement (three-tier cluster-load policy):
- Below 50% load. All ingest admitted, including over-allowance free traffic. Idle capacity is yours to use.
- 50–95% load. Free streams past their 10,000-minute allowance are rejected at new-ingest. Within-allowance free and all paying streams continue to be admitted.
- At redline (≥ 95%). All new free-tier ingest is rejected to preserve capacity for paying tenants. Existing live sessions are never killed mid-stream.
- Viewer-side gate. Below 80% load, all viewers admitted. 80–95%, new viewers of over-allowance free streams are rejected. At redline, all new free-stream viewers are rejected. Paying broadcasters’ viewers are always admitted.
- Fair-use caps. Free tenants are capped at 3 concurrent live streams and 200 concurrent viewers.
- Storage cap. At the 10 GB durable limit, new recordings, VOD uploads, and clip exports are rejected. Existing artifacts age out via the 7-day retention sweeper.
- Load is computed per media cluster as
max(avg(CPU%), uplink utilization %)across healthy edge nodes.
Seeded limitations:
- No AI workloads
- Watermarked player
- Community support only
- No SLA
Pay-As-You-Go (Current)
Section titled “Pay-As-You-Go (Current)”Add funds to a prepaid balance and pay as usage accrues. Usage is deducted at the rates below.
| Resource | Rate |
|---|---|
| Delivered Minutes | €0.00055/min |
| Cold storage | €0.035/GB-h |
Standard transcoding and multiview compositing are bundled into delivered minutes. Advanced processing (AI workloads such as live transcription, V2V transformations, automated highlights) is in pilot — see Advanced processing below.
Metered Tiers
Section titled “Metered Tiers”Paid tiers include monthly allocations with overage billing:
| Tier | Base | Delivered Minutes | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supporter | €79 | 120K | 90 days |
| Developer | €249 | 500K | 180 days |
| Production | €999 | 2M | 365 days |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Overages (metered tiers):
| Tier | Delivered Minutes | Cold storage |
|---|---|---|
| Supporter | €0.00055/min | €0.035/GB-h |
| Developer | €0.00052/min | €0.030/GB-h |
| Production | €0.00050/min | €0.025/GB-h |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Advanced processing
Section titled “Advanced processing”Advanced processing (AI workloads such as live transcription, video analysis, automated highlights, V2V transformations, and multi-stream compositing) is in pilot. These jobs use the same meter-based billing path as delivered minutes and storage, with product-shaped meters added per job or marketplace offer.
To request pilot access, contact us. Standard transcoding and multi-stream compositing remain bundled into delivered minutes.
Billing Models
Section titled “Billing Models”Prepaid
Section titled “Prepaid”Load credits first, use resources as you go. Balance decreases as usage accrues.
Thresholds:
| Balance | Effect |
|---|---|
| Below €5 | Low balance warning |
| €0 or below | New ingests blocked; playback may return 402 |
| Below -€10 | Account suspended; streams terminated |
Postpaid
Section titled “Postpaid”Monthly subscription with included delivered-minute allocations. Cold storage is rated from GiB-second usage and displayed as GiB-hours on invoice lines. Overages are drafted during the billing period and invoiced at period end. Requires verified billing details.
Topping Up
Section titled “Topping Up”Pay via Stripe or Mollie. Funds credit immediately after checkout.
Crypto
Section titled “Crypto”Create a prepaid top-up deposit in ETH or USDC. The deposit address comes with a 24h price-locked quote (Chainlink ETH/USD; USDC is 1:1) — send exactly the quoted amount and the balance is credited at the locked rate when the deposit confirms. LPT is reserved but currently rejected.
Confirmations:
- Ethereum: 12 confirmations
- Base: 10 confirmations
- Arbitrum: 10 confirmations
x402 Protocol
Section titled “x402 Protocol”For programmatic clients, FrameWorks supports the x402 protocol.
When balance is insufficient, the API returns HTTP 402 with payment requirements. Clients sign an EIP-3009 authorization and retry with the X-PAYMENT (or PAYMENT-SIGNATURE) header to top up automatically.
x402 supports USDC on Base and Arbitrum (EIP-3009 is a USDC primitive). Prepaid crypto top-ups support ETH and USDC.
Invoicing
Section titled “Invoicing”FrameWorks is registered in the EU and follows EU VAT invoicing rules.
Why the €100 Threshold
Section titled “Why the €100 Threshold”EU VAT law allows simplified invoices for transactions under €100. These invoices don’t require customer details—just the supplier info, amount, and VAT breakdown.
For payments under €100, we issue simplified invoices automatically. No billing details needed from you.
For payments €100 or above, EU law requires a full VAT invoice with your details (name, address, and VAT number if applicable). You must add billing details in your account settings before making large payments.
B2B in the EU
Section titled “B2B in the EU”If you’re a business in the EU, add your VAT number in account settings. We validate the format and apply reverse charge (0% VAT) automatically.
Record Keeping
Section titled “Record Keeping”All invoices are available in your account. We retain transaction records for 10 years per EU requirements.
Cluster Tiers
Section titled “Cluster Tiers”FrameWorks supports multiple deployment models with different billing characteristics:
| Tier | Description | Billing |
|---|---|---|
| Shared (Community) | Free access to a shared cluster with API abuse limits and no current tier-based stream/viewer caps. | Zero-priced metering with fair-use. |
| Shared (Premium) | Paid tiers on shared infrastructure with higher limits. | Per-resource metering (delivered minutes + cold storage today; more meters can be enabled per tier). |
| Dedicated | Isolated cluster with dedicated Foghorn and edges — operated by FrameWorks or self-hosted on-premise. | Custom pricing via cluster_pricing. |
| Hybrid | Self-hosted edges that fall back to the primary shared cluster. Edges federate via Foghorn; control/data plane remains shared. | Per-cluster usage attribution. |
| Marketplace | Third-party operators publish clusters with custom pricing. Tenants subscribe via the marketplace. | Operator-set pricing via cluster_subscriptions. |
Usage is attributed per cluster: the analytics pipeline tags every event with cluster_id (serving cluster) and origin_cluster_id (where the stream was ingested). Billing summaries are generated per cluster for settlement.
What’s Always Free
Section titled “What’s Always Free”- All API requests
- Stream creation and configuration
- Analytics queries
- Webhook deliveries
- Player embed generation
- Ingest (streaming in)—you pay for viewer delivery only