Why we stopped charging per stream

Reelium used to sell you a number of streams a month. As of this week it sells you a number of hours of stream analysed. Free gets 4 hours, Creator 14, Pro 28, Power 56. This post is why.

The old model priced the wrong thing

A stream is not a unit of anything. A 40-minute Just Chatting session and an eight-hour subathon were both "one stream" against your allowance, and they are nowhere near the same amount of work — the transcription, the chat replay and the picking all scale with the length of the source, not with the number of URLs you paste.

That produced two bad outcomes at once. Short streams were overpriced, so the people with the most sources to clip — variety streamers who go live often and briefly — burned their allowance fastest, on the cheapest work we do. And long streams were underpriced, which is a nice problem for the customer right up until the point where it stops being sustainable and the plan has to change anyway.

It also made the allowance impossible to reason about in advance. "Four streams" tells you nothing about whether the VOD you are about to paste will fit.

What the plans say now

Every plan is denominated in hours of stream analysed per month, and a VOD spends its own length out of that pool. So you can look at a five-hour source, look at your remaining hours, and know before you press the button — which is the whole point, and was not possible under a stream count.

• Free — 4 hours a month, across up to 6 VODs. Un-watermarked 1080p export, the full AI flow, no card.
• Creator — 14 hours a month.
• Pro — 28 hours a month.
• Power — 56 hours a month.

Two things that are not metered, and will not be. There is no cap on how many VODs you run on a paid plan; hours are the only ceiling. And there are no per-clip credits — every clip the picker finds in a source you have already paid to analyse is yours, however many that turns out to be. Charging twice for the same analysis is the thing I disliked most about every tool I tried before building this one.

The other ladder: how long one source can be

Separately from the monthly pool, each tier caps how long a single source may be: 4 hours on Free, 5 on Creator, 6 on Pro, 8 on Power. This is a real constraint rather than a sales device — a single very long source is where our processing gets fragile, and I would rather refuse it at the door than fail it forty minutes in.

Getting the two ladders in the right order took an embarrassing correction along the way: for a while the Pro card advertised a shorter maximum source than the tier below it. That is fixed, and the ordering is now derived from one place so the cards cannot drift apart from what the code enforces.

Names

The entry paid tier is now called Creator. It is the same plan; the old name described a stage of a business rather than a person, which was never who was buying it.

If you are already on a plan

Your subscription is unchanged and nothing was migrated behind your back. The pricing page is the current source of truth for every number above, and the changelog records each change with the date it shipped. If your usage does not fit the new shape, reply to any email from us and I will sort it out personally.

— Max