AIOZ Stream Pricing Explained: A Full Cost Breakdown

Most video infrastructure pricing pages end in a "contact sales" button. AIOZ Stream's doesn't: storage, delivery, and transcoding are each a flat published rate, billed from one wallet, with no quote to request and no volume tier to qualify for first. Here is the full rate card, how the billing actually works, and the one real tradeoff that comes with paying in tokens instead of a fixed monthly invoice.

TL;DR:

• AIOZ Stream charges $0.02/GB/month for storage, $0.02/GB for delivery, and $0.01-0.05/min for transcoding depending on resolution.
• Everything bills from one AIOZ token wallet with a 0.01 AIOZ minimum deposit, no negotiated contract, no separate billing relationship per service.
• Because the wallet is funded in a token with a floating price, the effective cost of a deposit in your local currency isn't fixed the way a traditional invoice is.

The full rate card

How the billing actually works

Every AIOZ Stream account gets an auto-generated wallet that holds AIOZ tokens, and only AIOZ tokens; depositing a different token risks losing it permanently, since the wallet isn't built to hold anything else. The minimum deposit is 0.01 AIOZ, converted at the live AIOZ/USDT market rate at the moment you deposit. From there, usage across all three services (storage, delivery, transcoding) draws down the same balance, and a daily usage history in the dashboard tracks exactly what was consumed and what it cost. Whatever mix of storage, delivery, and transcoding a given month actually used shows up on the same statement, instead of three separate bills to reconcile against each other.

The tradeoff worth knowing about

A traditional cloud invoice is denominated in your local currency and doesn't move once the rate is set. AIOZ Stream's rates are denominated in dollars, but the wallet itself holds AIOZ tokens, and tokens get converted at whatever the market rate happens to be at deposit time. That means the per-GB and per-minute rates are fixed, but how much local currency you actually need to fund a given amount of usage shifts with the token's price. There's no hidden fee or markup buried in that, it's a direct consequence of billing through a token wallet rather than a bank-denominated account, and it's worth budgeting for if you're used to a cloud bill that never moves between invoices. The full mechanics of how a deposit actually converts to credit, and why the specific token network you deposit on matters, are covered in our wallet and token billing explainer.

A worked example: what a mid-sized VOD library might cost

Say a library holds 500GB of encoded video, serves 2,000GB of delivery in a given month, and that month you transcode 100 hours of new source footage. The transcoding line is where people usually get surprised: the rate card bills per minute of output, not per minute of source, and adaptive bitrate delivery means one hour of source typically becomes several output renditions, not one. Assume three renditions per source hour, a reasonable middle ground for an SD-to-HD ladder:

Transcoding dominates the bill in this example, not because the per-minute rate is high, but because it's multiplied by however many renditions your ABR ladder actually produces. A library that only needs one rendition per source hour would see that same transcoding line drop to $60, for a $110 total. The lesson isn't the specific dollar figure, it's that the rendition count is the real lever on this line item, more than the per-minute rate itself.

Flip the shape of that same library and the dominant line item changes too. A platform that uploads relatively little new footage each month but serves a large, rewatched back catalog looks very different: say 5,000GB stored, 20,000GB delivered, and only 5 hours of new transcoding a month. That comes to $100 in storage, $400 in delivery, and $3 in transcoding (5 hours at the single-rendition HD rate), delivery now dominates by a wide margin, not transcoding. Which line item actually drives your bill depends entirely on your content's shape, upload-heavy and catalog-light skews toward transcoding, rewatch-heavy and upload-light skews toward delivery, and neither pattern is unusual on its own.

Checking your own numbers against the rate card

Because billing runs hourly against a wallet rather than accumulating into one end-of-month invoice, the daily usage history is the tool for actually verifying a bill matches the rate card rather than trusting it did. If a month's storage line looks higher than expected, the fix is checking whether stored volume actually grew that much or whether old renditions that should have been deleted are still sitting on the account, not guessing. The same applies to a delivery spike: it's either real traffic growth worth planning around, or a caching or CDN configuration issue worth investigating, and the daily breakdown is what tells you which one you're looking at instead of leaving it to a single opaque monthly total.

How storage and delivery compare to commodity cloud rates

Storage is close to commodity-priced everywhere: AWS S3 Standard runs around $0.023/GB/month for its entry tier, only marginally above AIOZ Stream's $0.02/GB/month. Delivery is where the gap actually opens up. AWS charges $0.09 per GB to send data out to the internet once you're past its 100GB monthly free allowance, more than four times AIOZ Stream's flat $0.02/GB delivery rate. For a delivery-heavy workload like video, where playback traffic usually dwarfs storage in raw GB served, that's the line item where the pricing model has the most room to matter, not storage.

How this compares to a negotiated cloud contract

Most enterprise video infrastructure pricing isn't actually published; getting a real number means a sales call, and the number you get often depends on your committed monthly spend rather than a rate card anyone can look up in advance. AIOZ Stream's three rates are the same for every account, visible before you sign up for anything, and don't change based on how much you commit to spend. That has a practical consequence beyond just knowing the number upfront: it means a cost estimate you build today for a project that hasn't launched yet is an estimate you can actually trust, since the rate that applies to your first invoice is the same rate documented publicly right now, not a placeholder waiting on a sales negotiation to finalize once you're already committed to the platform. The transcoding line specifically has already been checked directly against AWS's and Google Cloud's own published transcoding prices, including where AIOZ Stream isn't the cheapest option, in a dedicated transcoding pricing comparison, since a full three-way price comparison across every service is a bigger claim than one rate card can back up on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do storage, delivery, and transcoding get billed separately?
No. All three draw from the same AIOZ token wallet balance, tracked in one daily usage history rather than three separate invoices.

Is there a minimum monthly spend or contract?
No. The only minimum is a 0.01 AIOZ deposit to fund the wallet; there's no committed monthly spend or contract term.

Does the per-GB or per-minute rate change with volume?
No. The published rates are flat regardless of how much storage, delivery, or transcoding you use.

Why would my bill differ month to month if the rates are fixed?
Two reasons: your actual usage changes, and the wallet is funded in AIOZ tokens converted at the market rate at deposit time, so the local-currency cost of topping up isn't fixed the way a traditional invoice would be.

Can I deposit a different cryptocurrency into my AIOZ Stream wallet?
No. The wallet is built to hold AIOZ tokens only; depositing a different token risks losing it permanently.

Is storage or delivery the bigger opportunity for savings versus a traditional cloud provider?
Delivery, for most video workloads. Storage pricing across providers is close to commodity everywhere, while AWS-style internet egress can run 4x or more what AIOZ Stream charges for delivery, and delivery volume usually dwarfs storage for anything getting regularly watched.

Where do I check whether my actual usage matches what I expect to be billed?
The daily usage history in the dashboard, broken down by storage, delivery, and transcoding. It's the way to confirm a spike is real traffic growth rather than a leftover file or a configuration issue worth investigating.

Related Reading

• Import Existing HLS Video Without Re-Encoding: the storage-only billing line an import actually shows up as, with no transcoding charge
• Decentralized Storage vs Centralized Cloud for Video: the durability side of the storage cost broken down here
• When Does Decentralized Delivery Actually Save You Money?: the delivery-cost comparison this breakdown's numbers feed into
• AIOZ Stream Transcoding Pricing vs AWS and Google Cloud: the full numeric comparison for the transcoding line specifically
• One DePIN, Three Workloads: why storage, compute, and delivery sharing one network is also why they share one bill
• What Is AIOZ DePIN: how token-based compensation to node operators is what makes this pricing model possible
• How On-Chain Wallet Top-Ups and Token Billing Work: the full deposit and conversion mechanics

References

• AIOZ Stream payment documentation: the official source for the rates and wallet mechanics described above
• Video Streaming APIs: What Developers Actually Need to Know, Mux: general background on how video infrastructure pricing is typically structured