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CSS Billing

What are the billable items of CSS? How do I figure out what fees I need to pay for?

CSS billable items include basic services and value-added services. Extended service fees will be incurred when value-added features provided jointly by CSS and other Tencent Cloud services are used.

• Basic service fees: billed by downstream traffic/bandwidth generated by connecting users to cache origin servers. In other words, traffic/bandwidth fees will be incurred as long as your live streaming content is watched by viewers.

  Note：

  CSS provides two billing modes you can choose from: bill-by-traffic and bill-by-bandwidth. For detailed pricing, see “Bill-by-Traffic/Bandwidth” in Billing Overview. To switch billing modes, see Changing Billing Modes.

• Value-added service fees: such services include transcoding, recording, screencapture, and porn detection, which are all disabled by default. If you enable and use them, fees will be incurred. For detailed pricing, see “Value-Added Service Fees” in CSS Pricing Overview.
• Extended service fees: value-added services provided jointly by CSS and other Tencent Cloud services and charged according to the billing rules of the corresponding services. Using such services will incur extended service fees. For detailed pricing, see “Extended Service Fees” in CSS Pricing Overview.

How can I know whether my account has overdue payments?

You can log in to the CSS console and click Billing Center at the top right to enter the “Account Info” page. If your available balance is below 0 USD, your account has overdue payments. To continue using CSS and other services, please settle your overdue payments by topping up your account.

Will I be charged for upstream push?

• By default, fees are billed by downstream usage. However, upstream usage will also be billed when the ratio of upstream usage and downstream usage is larger than 1:10, and the daily upstream peak bandwidth exceeds 100 Mbps.
• Upstream usage will be billed according to the same billing modes and tiered pricing rules as downstream usage. Billing rules for upstream usage have been applied since 00:00, July 1, 2021.

When will value-added service fees start to be billed?

After value-added services that are bound with push domain names such as recording, screencapture, porn detection, and watermarking are enabled, fees will be incurred when push starts. After value-added services that are bound with playback domain names such as transcoding are enabled, fees will be incurred when playback starts. If you created a transcoding template and bound it with a playback domain name, transcoding fees will not be incurred if there is no playback. Enabling watermarking or stream mixing may incur standard transcoding fees, which will be billed by the resolution of the output live streams.

Transcoding Billing

How is live transcoding billed? How can I estimate the transcoding fees?

Live transcoding is billed by the transcoding codec, resolution, and corresponding duration. As stream mixing and watermarking are processed in the transcoding module, using such features will also incur transcoding fees. For details, see Transcoding Billing.
Transcoding fees will only be charged once if the same live stream is watched by multiple viewers at the same bitrate.

Example: suppose you used live transcoding and live watermarking on January 1, 2021, where live stream A was transcoded to H.264_720P for 1 hour and live stream B was watermarked at 480p for 30 minutes.
Then, the transcoding fees you would need to pay on January 2, 2021 would be 0.0057 (USD/min) × 60 (min) + 0.0028 (USD/min) × 30 (min) = 0.426 USD.

Why was a transcoding bill generated when I didn't use live transcoding?

Live transcoding services include live real-time transcoding, stream mixing, and watermarking. Using stream mixing or watermarking transcoding fees will also incur transcoding fees.

Will live stream mixing definitely incur transcoding fees?

Yes. The transcoding fees will be billed according to the output live stream after stream mixing. As the transcoding resources will be consumed after stream mixing is successful, the stream mixing duration will be used for billing, regardless of whether the stream is played back or not. This is different from common transcoding, which is billed by playback duration.

Live Recording Billing

How is live recording billed?

Live recording is billed by the peak number of concurrent recording channels in the current month, and the total number of recording channels in a statistical period is the concurrent channel peak. A single live stream recorded in one file format is counted as one recording channel. If you record in two formats (MP4 and HLS), they will be counted as two recording channels.

How is the live recording channel peak calculated?

When one live stream (one stream ID) is recorded in one file format, it will be counted as one live recording channel. The number of current recording channels will be queried once every 5 minutes, and the maximum value of sample points in the current month will be used as the monthly recording channel peak for billing.
Example:

Note：

• Yellow: recording task under stream ID A.
• Green: recording task under stream ID B.
• Blue: recording task under stream ID C.

Why was I charged 10.5882 USD after using live recording?

If two live streams are recorded simultaneously or one live stream is recorded into two file formats, two recording channels will be generated. Live recording is billed by the recording channel peak at a price of 5.2941 USD per channel per month, so if there are two channels in a month, then a fee of 10.5882 USD will be charged. For more information, please see Live Recording Billing.
We recommend you go to Bill Details > Bill by Instance in the Billing Center to check the billing details for live recording. You can click Bill Details in the "Operation" column to view the actual recording channel peak of the last month.