How minutes work
What gets metered, what does not, and how to read your balance and transaction history.
Updated
ScaleReach meters source minutes: the length of the video you put in, not the number of clips you get out. A 40-minute podcast costs 40 minutes whether it produces four clips or twenty.
Why it is billed that way
The expensive work scales with the source, not the output. Fetching, transcribing and analysing all run across the whole video once, and that is the bulk of the cost. Once the transcript exists, finding twenty moments instead of four is comparatively cheap.
Billing per source minute has a practical consequence worth planning around: long videos are where the value is. A two-hour interview costs the same 120 minutes whether you take three clips or thirty, so it pays to work through the whole batch rather than taking the first good one and moving on.
It also means the unit is directly comparable when you are weighing tools up. Several competitors meter per output clip, per video with a length cap, or in credits that convert at a rate you have to look up.
What does not cost minutes
- Editing a clip. Trimming, recaptioning, reframing and adding overlays are free.
- Re-rendering after an edit. Included in the above.
- Downloading and sharing. No cost, no limit on how many times.
- Scheduling and publishing. Not metered.
- Storage. Keeping clips around costs nothing.
Only putting a new source video in spends minutes.
Reading your balance
The credits page shows your current balance and a transaction history, so you can see what each video actually consumed rather than inferring it. If a number looks wrong, the history is the thing to check first — it lists the debits individually.
A video that fails partway does not consume your whole balance for it, but a video that was fetched and transcribed before failing has already done the expensive part.
Running out
When the balance is short you will be told before a video is submitted, not after, so you do not lose a video to it. Minutes come from your plan, and top-ups are available if you need more before the cycle resets.