Per-job billing from a prepaid credit balance. New accounts get $5 free. Compose bills per minute of the video you get back. Every other job type bills for the compute it consumed, including jobs that fail.
Plans
ffmpeg, MCP, and webhooks are on every plan. Compose costs the same per output minute on every plan. Animated graphics above 1080p or 30 fps need an enterprise plan. Full limits table: Limits.
For a full pricing breakdown and plan comparison, see rendobar.com/pricing/.
Credit packs
$10 / $25 / $50 / $100 (or custom, $10 minimum). Pro and Studio add +25% to every purchase. Buy $25, get $31.25. Credits never expire.
How does nanodollar billing work?
Every job is billed in nanodollars (one-billionth of a US dollar) drawn from your prepaid balance. This differs from tier-based quotas where you buy a plan with a bucket of minutes:
- Cost matches the work. Compute-billed jobs pay for the seconds they ran, and compose pays for the seconds of video it delivers. A 30-second 1080p job shouldn’t cost the same as a 10-minute 4K render of a large master.
- Prepaid means predictable budgets. You top up when you want. Jobs run only if affordable. No end-of-month surprise bill.
When is a job charged?
- Submit gate. Submit is atomic and does not reject on concurrency. If your balance is greater than zero the job is accepted. Jobs run at your plan’s concurrency and any extra wait in a queue, starting in order as slots free. We do not estimate cost at submit. For compose,
POST /compose/validate returns the price before you submit. A zero balance returns 402 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS, and a full queue returns 429 QUEUE_FULL.
- Execution. Job runs. Balance untouched.
- Debit on terminal status. Every terminal job (
complete, failed, or cancelled) settles its charge here. The debit is atomic with the status update. How is a job priced? covers what each job type pays for.
- No auto-refund. Failed compute-billed jobs are still charged for the compute they consumed. A failed compose render follows its own rule, below. If you believe a job failed due to a platform bug, contact support. Refunds are issued at our discretion via the dispute process.
What happens when a balance goes negative?
Because the submit gate checks balance > 0 rather than an estimate, a single long-running job can drive your balance briefly negative when the terminal debit lands. When that happens, further submits are blocked with 402 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS until you top up. Once your balance is positive again, jobs are accepted immediately. Nothing else on the account changes.
How is a job priced?
ffmpeg bills per compute second, which is the wall-clock time FFmpeg ran your command, excluding upload and download. The same per-second rate applies whether the job completes successfully or fails partway through. Every job type except compose bills this way.
compose bills per second of the video you get back, at $0.04 per minute of output on every plan, with a 15-second minimum per render. Frame size and animated graphics do not change the rate. Plans differ in what they can render. 1440p needs Pro, 4K and 60 fps need Studio, and a video above your plan returns 403 PLAN_LIMIT before it renders. An enterprise plan carries its own contract rate. Email hello@rendobar.com.
A compose render that fails on Rendobar’s side is free. When the failure may come from your input, such as the render tool exiting on a bad file, it pays for the compute it used at 2x. POST /compose/validate returns the price before you render. Full detail: compose pricing.
If your balance is at or below zero when you submit:
HTTP 402. Top up at app.rendobar.com/billing.
How do I check my balance?
balance.amount is in dollars. Internally balances are stored in nanodollars (1 USD = 1,000,000,000).
How do I track usage?
Returns daily usage by job type: count, amount charged, and compute seconds.
Practical advice
- Start on Free. The $5 signup grant covers 125 minutes of compose output, or many hundreds of small FFmpeg jobs.
- Store
cost.nanodollars from every response. Reconcile against your monthly invoice.
See also
Last modified on October 27, 2026
