2026-07-30 · Business
Why we bill requests instead of egress
Bandwidth meters are easy to sell and hard to predict. We removed ours and replaced it with request accounting — here is the reasoning, and what it changes for a media workload.
The problem with egress meters
Egress pricing looks simple until a video cache hit ratio moves by ten percent, or a client library starts issuing range requests instead of full downloads. The stored bytes did not change; the invoice tripled. Teams then optimise against the meter instead of against their product, which is exactly backwards.
What we meter instead
Storage, metered hourly on the average object size, and request count, metered monthly. Both are things you control with engineering decisions you would make anyway: fewer objects, longer-lived URLs, sensibly sized parts.
What it changes in practice
A media customer moved from a full-download pattern to range requests in the player and cut egress by two thirds — and their ObjectBasin bill barely moved, because the request count rose by a similar factor while no bytes were metered. Optimising delivery no longer punishes the invoice.