Estimating usage & costs

It can be daunting to figure out how much a usage-based platform like FastPix will cost, but there are simple ways to estimate your usage and costs.

This guide explains why we price based on usage, how to estimate your usage, and tips on how to reduce your costs.

Explore our pricing page to view full pricing details. Our pricing includes an ingest, storage and streaming component. You can easily select different resolutions with corresponding pricing.

Why do we price based on usage?

Really it comes down to this: The more you use FastPix, the more value you get, and the more it costs us to process and store your data. Thus, we charge based on usage.

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PLEASE NOTE

Your usage is calculated based on the quantity, that is per minute of video upload, the volume of video you store (per min of video), and the amount of video (per min) your users stream each month.

How our pay-as-you-go pricing works?

Pricing for video streaming products is often complicated and we don’t want you wondering. We believe what we have below is the easiest way to visualize and understand pricing.

Here’re sample invoices which explains our pay-as-you-go model including resolution and volume discounts:

View our Complete pricing breakdown

How do I estimate my streaming usage?

If you're already using another tool and want to switch to FastPix (welcome!), your existing tool may have the exact numbers (minutes) you need. You might need to ask their support for this data directly if it's not easy to find.

Alternatively, you can use one of these two methods.

Option 1: Sign up for free and estimate your usage with $25 free credits

Each of our products has a generous free tier with $25 worth of credits. They're also very easy to get set up. Simply sign up and start to use whichever product you are interested in.

We estimate that, with $25 of video you can:

• Upload/encode two full length movies or 250 one-minute user-created videos
• Store those videos for six months
• Stream 60 hours to viewers
• Or host a real-time event with 10 participants and unlimited live stream viewers for up to 6 hours.

This should give you an estimation of your basic usage requirements. You can also consider various scenarios to estimate your streaming usage.

Option 2: Using scenarios to estimate your minutes of usage

When estimating video consumption for your application, it’s essential to consider different usage scenarios. Whether you have an existing user base or are launching something entirely new, here are three approaches to estimate video engagement:

We estimate that, with $25 of video you can:

1. Conservative Estimate:
   • Suppose you expect 200 active users in the initial months.
   • Each user might stream approximately 50 minutes of video per month.
   • This scenario provides a cautious estimate of usage.
     
     
2. Moderate Estimate:
   • Anticipate around 500 active users during the initial phase.
   • These users may stream about an hour and a half of video monthly.
   • This estimate balances realism and optimism.
     
     
3. Ambitious Estimate:
   • In an ideal scenario, aim for 1,200 active users.
   • Assume they’ll stream approximately 3 hours of video per month.
   • This optimistic projection accounts for potential high adoption.

By applying these three scenarios to your calculator, you can derive a range of costs. This range might be broad, but it will provide a clearer picture of potential streaming usage based on user engagement.

Once you’ve figured your projected streaming usage (minutes and views), you can use the pricing calculator on our pricing page and calculate your estimated monthly costs for adopting FastPix.

Resolution-based pricing

We offer resolution-based pricing tiers, which are determined by total number of pixels in the video calculated by multiplying its height and width. These tiers are applicable to encoding, storage, and streaming(delivery) services. If a video is delivered in multiple resolutions, it will be charged based on the minutes delivered for each resolution. Automatic discounts are applied based on the resolution of your videos.

Add-ons

Our pricing is designed to make you happy. We move additional functionality and features to add-ons to keep our base prices low. This is so you never pay for functionality that you don't want or need.

Here is our list of add-ons that we currently offer. Add new features or expand existing capabilities of your product to create a custom video experience that truly works for you.