Charging by the byte allows us to support any kind of conversion with a single $/GB metric.

Transloadit handles many types of files. Not all of those have a duration (documents, zip files, images, web pages) and the ones that do (audio & video) are not all created equal. If we charged by the minute, we would need separate rates for low-res vs. 4K. That’s already getting quite complex and it would only get worse when new formats come out — 32K anyone?

We do offer discounts when we can in order to pass on savings. For instance, because 🤖/video/thumbs is very lightweight, it only counts every tenth byte flowing through.