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 Bills to view past bills and see an estimate of your bill for next month.
https://dashboard.boxcast.com/#/settings/storage
Avoiding Storage Charges
To avoid being charged for storage, you have several options:
- Contact our sales team to sign up for an auto-delete plan. In this mode, your broadcasts will be available on-demand for the duration of your specified storage window. Once the window is over, your videos will become inaccessible to viewers. Again, remember that your storage is relative to each broadcast.
- 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.
Remember, the rate that BoxCast charges for storage is still much less than what you'd find by trying to store the videos yourself. So it's up to you whether you want to handle archive storage yourself or let BoxCast store everything for you.
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.