AIOZ Stream Pricing: Storage, Delivery, Transcoding

TL;DR:

• AIOZ Stream charges for three things: storage ($0.02/GB/month), delivery ($0.02/GB), and transcoding ($0.01 to $0.05/min depending on resolution).
• Billing runs hourly against a wallet you fund with AIOZ tokens, not a monthly invoice. Minimum deposit is 0.01 AIOZ.
• Storage pricing is close to what AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage already charge. It's delivery where the gap opens up: AWS charges $0.09/GB to send data to the internet, more than 4x AIOZ Stream's $0.02/GB.
• Transcoding cost scales with output resolution, not just video length, so a 4K encode costs 5x what an HD encode of the same footage costs.
• There's no separate egress tier, no per-request fee, and no volume discount ladder. What you see in the docs is what you pay, at any volume.

Most cloud pricing pages read like a tax form: a storage rate here, a request-fee schedule there, a discount tier if you commit to a minimum spend. AIOZ Stream's pricing is three numbers. That simplicity is worth taking seriously on its own, separate from any claim about who's cheaper, so this is a straight walk through what each number actually covers, how the billing mechanics work day to day, and where the three deeper articles below go if you need the full math.

The three things you actually pay for

Per AIOZ Stream's own payment documentation, billing has exactly three components:

• Storage: $0.02 per GB per month, calculated hourly (the monthly rate divided by the number of hours in that month).
• Delivery: $0.02 per GB of data actually delivered to viewers.
• Transcoding: $0.01 per minute of video up to HD, $0.02 per minute for 2K, $0.05 per minute for 4K.

That's the entire pricing surface. There's no separate line for API calls, no charge for creating or deleting a video, and no tiered discount you need to negotiate your way into at scale. For the full worked math on a real video library's monthly bill, see our complete cost breakdown.

To make the three numbers concrete: a 500 GB video library, delivered to viewers to the tune of 2 TB of playback traffic in a month, with 200 videos transcoded up to HD at an average of 3 minutes each, works out to roughly $10 in storage, $40 in delivery, and $6 in transcoding. About $56 total. Swap even a third of those videos to a 4K rung and the transcoding line alone jumps past the storage and delivery lines combined. The exact dollar figure depends entirely on your own traffic and resolution mix, so don't treat $56 as a benchmark. What matters is that all three numbers are visible and multiplyable ahead of time, instead of buried behind a tiered rate card you only fully understand after the first invoice.

How billing actually works day to day

AIOZ Stream doesn't invoice you at the end of the month. When you create an account, a wallet is generated automatically, and you fund it by sending AIOZ tokens to that wallet's address. The minimum deposit is 0.01 AIOZ; anything below that gets recorded but not credited to your balance until your cumulative deposits clear the threshold. Your credited balance is calculated from the AIOZ/USDT conversion rate at the moment each deposit lands, and usage is deducted from that balance hourly as storage, delivery, and transcoding happen, not batched into a single end-of-month charge.

Two practical consequences follow from this. First, your effective dollar cost per GB can drift slightly with the AIOZ token's market rate between the day you deposit and the day you consume the credit, since the conversion locks in at deposit time. Second, because billing runs hourly rather than monthly, a daily usage history is available broken down by storage, delivery, and transcoding, which is more granular visibility than a typical monthly cloud invoice gives you by default. The mechanics of deposits, conversion rates, and the one real risk this billing model carries that fiat billing doesn't are covered in full in How On-Chain Wallet Top-Ups and Token Billing Work.

Transcoding is the one cost that scales with resolution, not just runtime

Storage and delivery pricing are straightforward: a GB costs the same whether it's a podcast or a feature film. Transcoding doesn't work that way. A 10-minute video transcoded up to HD costs $0.10. The same 10 minutes transcoded to 4K costs $0.50, five times as much, because the compute cost of encoding actually does scale with resolution. This matters most for anyone deciding how many resolution rungs to offer in a bitrate ladder: adding a 4K rung to a library that mostly gets watched on phones is a real, measurable cost, not a free checkbox. We compared these transcoding rates directly against AWS MediaConvert and Google Cloud's Transcoder API, tier by tier, in AIOZ Stream Transcoding Pricing vs AWS and Google Cloud.

Where decentralized delivery pricing actually wins

Storage is the one category where AIOZ Stream isn't dramatically different from commodity cloud pricing. Google Cloud Storage's Standard regional class runs close to $0.02/GB/month too, and AWS S3 Standard sits only marginally above it. Storage, in other words, is roughly commodity-priced everywhere.

Delivery is where the numbers diverge. AWS charges $0.09 per GB to send data out to the internet once you're past its 100 GB monthly free allowance, more than four and a half times AIOZ Stream's flat $0.02/GB delivery rate. That gap compounds fast for anything delivery-heavy: a video platform serving a lot of playback traffic spends far more on egress than on storage, which is exactly the workload shape where AIOZ Stream's pricing structure has the most room to matter. It's not a universal "cheaper in every scenario" claim, and we don't treat it as one. The honest, worked-through version of when the savings actually show up (and when they don't) is in When Does Decentralized Delivery Actually Save You Money?

Questions worth asking before you commit

Flat, transparent pricing still requires you to know your own usage shape before you can tell whether it's a good deal for your specific case. A few questions are worth answering first:

• What's the actual split between storage and delivery in your workload? A video archive that's rarely watched leans on storage pricing, where AIOZ Stream is close to commodity rates. A platform with a lot of repeat viewing leans on delivery, where the gap against AWS-style egress pricing is largest.
• How many resolution rungs do you really need? Since transcoding cost scales directly with resolution, offering 4K to an audience that mostly watches on phones is a real, recurring cost for a quality bump most of your viewers won't notice.
• How volatile is your traffic? Hourly billing against a prepaid wallet means a traffic spike shows up in your balance the same day it happens, not smoothed into a monthly average the way a typical cloud invoice would present it. That's useful visibility, but it also means you should keep a comfortable buffer in your wallet if your traffic is spiky.

What isn't priced separately

A few things that show up as their own line items on other platforms don't exist at all here. There's no per-API-request charge for calling the video, media, or webhook endpoints. There's no separate "origin fetch" or "cache miss" fee layered on top of delivery pricing, the kind of charge that shows up on some CDN bills when content isn't already cached at the edge closest to a viewer. And there's no volume-commitment tier you need to negotiate into to unlock a better rate; the $0.02/GB storage and delivery numbers are the same whether you're serving ten videos or ten thousand. That flatness is a direct consequence of how the underlying AIOZ DePIN network of edge nodes is structured: a large, distributed pool of independent operators rather than a small number of centrally owned data centers with their own fixed overhead to recoup through tiered pricing and volume negotiation.

FAQ

Do I need a credit card to use AIOZ Stream?
No. Billing runs on a wallet funded with AIOZ tokens, not a card. You deposit tokens to your auto-generated wallet address, and usage is deducted from that balance as you go.

What happens if my wallet balance runs out?
Usage is deducted hourly against your balance, so it's worth monitoring the daily usage history in your account rather than letting the balance run to zero unexpectedly, particularly if you're running a delivery-heavy workload where consumption is less predictable than storage.

Is the $0.02/GB delivery rate the same worldwide, or does it vary by region?
The published rate in AIOZ Stream's payment documentation is a single flat number, not a region-differentiated one the way AWS and Google Cloud structure their egress pricing. That's part of what makes the three-number pricing model simple to reason about.

Does the transcoding cost include storing the transcoded output?
Transcoding and storage are billed as separate line items. The $0.01 to $0.05 per minute transcoding charge covers the encoding work itself; storing the resulting files afterward is billed at the standard $0.02/GB/month storage rate like any other file.

Why does AIOZ Stream bill hourly instead of monthly?
Because usage is deducted directly from a prepaid wallet balance rather than accumulated into an invoice, hourly billing is simply how the deduction mechanics work. The practical upside is a daily usage history broken down by storage, delivery, and transcoding, rather than a single number at the end of the month.

Do storage costs stop the moment I delete a video?
Storage is billed hourly based on what's actually stored, so cost accrual for a given file stops once it's deleted and the deletion has been processed. It is not held or pro-rated for a fixed billing period the way some monthly-cycle cloud storage plans behave.

Related reading

• How On-Chain Wallet Top-Ups and Token Billing Work
• AIOZ Stream Pricing Explained: A Full Cost Breakdown
• AIOZ Stream Transcoding Pricing vs AWS and Google Cloud
• When Does Decentralized Delivery Actually Save You Money?
• What Is AIOZ DePIN and How It Powers Video Delivery