Pricing and billing

Prices

US dollars per footage-hour (an hour of source media, not of processing time), per stage:

• Camera RAW means R3D, BRAW and ARRIRAW, decoded on GPUs. Everything else, including ProRes and other high-bitrate intermediates, is standard.
• Volume rates apply to the footage beyond 500 footage-hours in a UTC calendar month, marginally: the first 500 hours of the month are always at the standard rate.
• The transcript rate is charged once per transcribed audio track.

GET /pricing returns this table (in US cents) and is the source of truth; it needs no key:

curl https://api.framequery.com/v1/api/pricing

{
  "data": {
    "currency": "USD",
    "unit": "footage_hour",
    "standard": { "visionCentsPerHour": 115, "transcriptCentsPerHour": 35, "volumeVisionCentsPerHour": 80, "volumeTranscriptCentsPerHour": 20, "allCentsPerHour": 150, "volumeAllCentsPerHour": 100 },
    "raw": { "visionCentsPerHour": 165, "transcriptCentsPerHour": 85, "volumeVisionCentsPerHour": 130, "volumeTranscriptCentsPerHour": 70, "allCentsPerHour": 250, "volumeAllCentsPerHour": 200 },
    "volumeThresholdSeconds": 1800000,
    "minBillableSeconds": 30,
    "rounding": "per_second_ceil_total_to_cent"
  }
}

How charging works

• Per completed stage. Each billable stage is charged when it completes. A stage that fails or is skipped is never charged, so there is nothing to refund. Ingest is free.
• Per second. Billable seconds are the media duration rounded up to the next second, with a 30-second minimum per job. The job total is rounded up to the whole cent once (minimum 1 cent).
• Cancelling charges only the stages that complete; see Cancel a job.
• Holds. Once the duration is known, the job's full price is held against your balance so running jobs cannot overspend it. billing.estimatedCents on the job is the current hold and billing.chargedCents is what has been charged so far (completed stages only). The hold is released when the job ends.
• Credit checks. Creating a job needs available credits for at least 30 seconds of footage, otherwise 402 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS. If the balance cannot cover the whole file once its duration is known, the job fails with job error INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS and nothing is charged.

Estimate a job before you send it

GET /pricing/estimate runs the same function that bills, so it cannot drift from the real charge. No key needed.

curl "https://api.framequery.com/v1/api/pricing/estimate?durationSeconds=2700&tier=standard&mode=all&audioTracks=1"

{
  "data": {
    "cents": 113,
    "usd": 1.13,
    "currency": "USD",
    "billableSeconds": 2700,
    "durationSeconds": 2700,
    "tier": "standard",
    "mode": "all",
    "audioTracks": 1,
    "priorUsageSeconds": 0
  }
}

Worked examples

Credits and billing

The API is prepaid. One credit is one US cent.

• Buy credits on the API keys page in packs of $10 (1,000 credits), $50 (5,000) or $100 (10,000). Checkout runs on Polar, our billing provider, and the purchase also issues your API key.
• See your balance with GET /quota, or in the Polar customer portal (the Open Polar portal button on the API keys page).
• Enterprise pay-as-you-go: accounts with high or unpredictable volume can be billed monthly in arrears instead of prepaying, with an optional monthly cap. Contact us to set it up.

curl https://api.framequery.com/v1/api/quota \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FRAMEQUERY_API_KEY"

data.api holds balanceCents (credits bought minus credits used), heldCents (reserved by running jobs), availableCents (what new jobs can use), payAsYouGo, monthUsageSeconds and tier (standard, or volume once you pass 500 hours this month). When credits cannot be read at that moment, available is false and the other fields are omitted; retry shortly.

Compared with other APIs

List or pay-as-you-go prices, normalised to US dollars per footage-hour, as of 13 October 2026. Each figure links to the provider's pricing page; check there for current numbers.

Where we are cheaper and where we are not:

• Video understanding (scenes plus transcript) costs about a third of Twelve Labs' indexing plus analysis and about a sixth of Google's label, shot and speech features.
• Transcription only costs more with us than with AssemblyAI, Deepgram or Rev.ai, and less than Gladia's list price. If you only need transcripts at the lowest price, those are good choices. Our transcript makes most sense alongside scenes, or when you need camera RAW or very large files handled without transcoding.
• Our object labels are labels, not bounding boxes, and the beta API does not include search.