If your BoxCast account is billed for storage, you will be charged for broadcasts that are active in your account for longer than your free storage duration. Free storage is provided in a rolling window. This means that your free storage doesn’t begin from the moment you sign up with BoxCast; instead, each individual broadcast has a free storage window that begins counting from the start time of the broadcast. The exact rate you are charged is specified in your contract (usually $0.49 per broadcast-hour).
You can sign on to the BoxCast Dashboard to view your storage bills. Simply navigate to Settings > Storage to view past bills, see an estimate of your bill for next month, and change your storage policy.
https://dashboard.boxcast.com/#/settings/storage
Avoiding Storage Charges
To avoid being charged for storage, you have several options:
- Go into the storage area of the dashboard and click on Edit for your storage policy and change it to Auto-Delete. This will delete all broadcasts that are over your storage policy limit. For example, if you have 1 year of free storage with BoxCast, anything that is 1 year or older will get deleted.
- Download or export your recordings after the broadcast is over, and then delete the archived broadcast from your BoxCast Dashboard.
- Delete older broadcasts that you don’t care about, such as test broadcasts or redundant broadcasts (e.g. if you have both 9am and 12am services weekly, you might only keep one of them). You can switch to the list-view mode to delete several older broadcasts at once. This will keep your storage bill low.
• Tip 1: Switch to the list-view mode to delete several older broadcasts at once.
• Tip 2: Find the most costly broadcasts by looking at the storage bill details.
• Note: Analytics from deleted broadcasts remain as part of your account indefinitely. - Utilize “live-only” broadcasts if you have no desire to save a recording of a broadcast or wish to only offer the stream live to viewers.
How Storage Bills Are Calculated:
Storage amounts are computed individually for each broadcast that’s active on your BoxCast account. The sum of the storage due for each broadcast is then billed on the first of the month.
To understand your bill, you need to know the following pieces of information:
- Your billing rate (e.g. $0.49 / broadcast-hr)
- Your storage duration grace period (e.g. 30 days)
- The list of broadcasts on your account. For each broadcast, you'll need to know the duration of the broadcast and the start date/time of the broadcast.
The dashboard lists all of these details for you to review, including the list of broadcasts that contributed to a bill and the amount you were charged for each specific broadcast.
For example, if you have a 30 day storage grace period and you broadcast once per month, your bill might look like this:
Bill Date: April 1, 2017
Broadcasts:
• March 1, 2017, 1 hour (free since within 30 day grace period)
• February 1, 2017, 1 hour ($0.49)
• January 1, 2017, 1 hour ($0.49)
⇒ Total Bill: $0.98
Bills less than $0.50 are never charged.
If you have more questions about storage, please reach out to our billing team at payments@boxcast.com