Billing & metering¶

HeapStream sells two product lines, and both are designed so you can estimate your bill on a napkin.

• Packages (Start, Pro, Advanced) are flat monthly plans with storage, bandwidth, and seat quotas stated up front. Every feature is on every package. Packages start with a 14-day trial: your card is collected at checkout and the subscription converts automatically unless you cancel first. A week before the trial converts you get a reminder email with the exact price, the charge date, and a cancellation link — if you cancel before that date, nothing is charged.
• Metered is pure pay-as-you-go for teams building on the API: $25 per TB stored per month and $10 per TB delivered, no monthly fee, no minimum, and no trial (your first API call already costs only cents). Encoding, AI features, analytics, and the player are free on both lines.

Units¶

All billing math uses decimal units: 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes and 1 TB = 1,000 GB, matching how CDN and storage providers price. When your plan says 2 TB, that's 2×10¹² bytes.

How usage is measured¶

Usage is recorded once per day, per account, in our own ledger, and that ledger is the source of truth for every number you see and every line on an invoice:

• Storage is measured in GB-days: each day we record the storage you held that day (after the cold storage discount, which applies on pay-as-you-go only). A partial month costs a partial month — the daily rate is set so a full month never exceeds the advertised $25 per TB.
• Delivery is every byte a CDN serves for your account, recorded per day. One honest disclosure: an MP4 download served through our progressive-download path is read back through the CDN internally as it's served, so it counts roughly twice its file size; standard HLS streaming counts once.

Metered usage is invoiced by Polar, our billing provider, at the end of each billing cycle, together with any fixed subscription price.

What happens at a cap¶

No surprise bills, no forced upgrades:

• At 80% of your included bandwidth we email you, once per cycle.
• At 100% with overage off, playback keeps working — the top quality reduces to 720p for the rest of the month instead of going dark. Upgrading, or turning on overage, lifts it immediately.
• A full storage quota pauses new uploads only; playback never stops.

Overage billing (packages on monthly billing)¶

Overage is off by default — with it off, nothing beyond your fixed price is ever billed. Turning it on (Account → Billing) bills delivery beyond your included bandwidth at $0.01 per GB, back to the start of the current cycle; your included amounts are always free. Turning it off stops future usage billing, and anything already reported bills at the end of the cycle. During a trial, usage beyond your included quotas is invoiced when the trial converts, or when it's canceled.

Yearly plans are never billed for extra usage. Overage is a monthly-billing option only, so there is no end-of-year surprise: past your included bandwidth we reduce top playback quality to 720p for the rest of the month rather than charging you. If you need more headroom, upgrade your plan or switch to monthly billing, where overage can be turned on. (Your included delivery is still granted for the full year, 12 × the monthly amount, and shows that way in the billing portal.)

A safety cap backstops all usage billing: 20 TB stored and 50 TB delivered per month (raised per account by support). Past a safety cap we degrade or pause instead of billing on.

Limits¶

The dashboard's uploader always offers exactly the limit your plan accepts.