Sometimes pricing can be a hard topic to navigate, especially when we have to make the difficult decision to raise prices for existing customers. However, as we grow and learn this can sometimes be unavoidable. In the rare occasion that we do raise prices, we try to be as transparent as possible with our thoughts behind these decisions.

As you may know, many of our Robots have discounts associated with them. Our exporting Robots were free if you also encoded files, and our importing Robots were free always, under the assumption that other transcoding Steps would always follow in order to amount to anything useful.

But since files can also be downloaded from our temporary storage, some customers have been instructing us to import a file, and then download it from temporary storage within 24 hours. We hadn't considered this usage pattern, but it exists. Having to shoulder these added bandwidth costs has put extra strain on us at a time when we're looking to be more ambitious than ever.

We have had to adjust our pricing and make it more similar to how exporting already works. In cases where an Assembly only contains an import or export Step, and no transcoding Step, we'll charge 0% of the file size on the import step, and 10% on the export Step. For example, a 100MB import and export to S3, would still only be 10MB of usage (0MB for import, 10MB for export).

However, if there is only an import or upload Step, and no transcoding or export Step, then we'd also charge 10% on the import file sizes (0% up until now).

This change is effective immediately.

As always, we're happy to hear your thoughts on this change, either on Twitter or via support.