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Billing

Live is billed on a pay-per-use basis by default. You pay only for what you use. You can also buy economical resource packages. Live provides both traffic and transcoding packages.

Billing Items

The billing items of the Live service include traffic/bandwidth (by traffic, peak bandwidth, 95 percentile bandwidth, or daily average peak bandwidth), transcoding, recording, and snapshot capturing. Some billing items can be deducted from packages. Each billing item has different billing modes. For details, see Table 1. For more information about pricing, see Live Pricing Details.

Table 1 Live billing

Billing Item

Description

Payment Option

Traffic/Bandwidth
  • By traffic
  • By peak bandwidth
  • By 95th percentile bandwidth
  • By average daily peak bandwidth
  • Traffic: pay-per-use and yearly/monthly
  • Bandwidth: pay-per-use

Transcoding

Billed based on the duration of the content you output
  • Pay-per-use
  • Yearly/Monthly

Recording
  • Monthly recording: You will be billed by Live based on the peak number of concurrent recording channels in a month.
  • Packaging: You will be billed by VOD based on the duration of an audio or video file that you output. Only recordings in VOD can be packaged.
  • Recording storage: You will be billed based on the used storage space. If recordings are stored in an OBS bucket, you will be billed by OBS. If recordings are stored in the VOD service, you will be billed by VOD.
  • Monthly recording: pay-per-use
  • Packaging: pay-per-use
  • Recording: pay-per-use and yearly/monthly

Snapshot capturing
  • Snapshot capturing: You will be billed by Live based on the number of captured snapshots.
  • Snapshot storage: You will be billed by OBS based on the storage space you use.
  • Snapshot capturing: pay-per-use
  • Snapshot storage: pay-per-use and yearly/monthly

Billing Modes

Live provides two billing modes: pay-per-use and yearly/monthly. For details, see Live Pricing Details.

  • Pay-per-use: In each billing cycle, the system calculates the fee based on the actual usage of each resource multiplied by the unit price, and then deducts the fee from your account balance. The outbound data transfers can be billed:
    • By traffic. You will be billed based on the actual traffic you use.
    • By peak bandwidth. The system measures and records the highest bandwidth value in the unit of Mbit/s every 5 minutes, so 288 values are recorded every day. The highest measurement per day is used as the billable bandwidth.
    • By 95th percentile bandwidth. Within a calendar month, the bandwidth is measured and recorded every 5 minutes on each valid day. At the end of the month, the records are sorted from the highest to the lowest, and the top 5% of the recorded bandwidth values are thrown away. Then the highest bandwidth value in the remaining records is the billable bandwidth of the month.
    • By average daily peak bandwidth. In a calendar month, the system calculates the average of the maximum peak bandwidths of all valid days to obtain the monthly billed bandwidth.

    Changes between billed by traffic and by peak bandwidth can be made on the Dashboard page of the Live console. If you want to be billed by 95th percentile bandwidth or by average daily peak bandwidth, submit a service ticket. V0 and V1 customers can only be billed by traffic.

  • Prepaid packages: You can purchase a Live resource package. The quota in the package will be deducted first when you use the Live service. You can increase the quota by making multiple purchases. A package is valid for one year. After a package expires, the unused quota in the package will be cleared. Currently, only traffic packages and live transcoding packages are provided.

Renewal

You can renew a resource package before it is used up. If you fail to renew your subscription, the Live service fee will be deducted from your account balance. To renew the subscription, go to the Renewals page.

Expiration and Overdue Payment

  • Arrears: In pay-per-use mode, fees are deducted based on each billing item. If the account balance is insufficient, the system fails to deduct the fees of the previous billing cycle. As a result, your account is in arrears, and a retention period will be granted based on your customer tier. You can view your customer tier on the Basic Information page. If you want to continue to use Live, top up your account in the retention period. For details, see Grace Period and Retention Period.
  • Expiration: Pay-per-use resources do not expire. A resource package remains valid for 12 months. If the package expires, the remaining resources will be cleared. Since then, you will be billed for subsequent resource usage on a pay-per-use basis.