MediaLab provides different kinds of storage options for customers. The most common type is object storage with pay-as-you-go billing, ensuring you only pay for what you use.

Most subscriptions include a set amount of storage. Once that limit is reached, the pay-as-you-go rate is applied.

Billing Model

• Storage usage is billed per hour.
• Monthly storage prices (per GB per month) are calculated based on 730 hours per month (average over a year).
• Storage usage is processed hourly and charged as GB-hour.

Example Calculation

If your rate is €0,03 per GiB per month:

• 1 GB stored for 1 hour → (1 ÷ 730) × €0,03 = €0,000041
• 1 GB stored for 1 day → (24 ÷ 730) × €0,03 = €0,00986
• 1 GB stored for 1 month → €0,03 × 1 = €0,30

Invoices

• The number of GB-hours used is included in the invoice.
• The total storage usage is shown in your account dashboard.
• Pay-as-you-go storage can be enabled or disabled by owners under the Extensions tab.

Note: Disabling pay-as-you-go storage does not delete any data. You may still be charged for storage already used.

Bandwidth

Depending on your contract, bandwidth usage may:

• Be included under a fair-use policy, or
• Incur a separate fee.

Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS)

MediaLab supports Azure storage accounts and S3-compatible storage.

• With BYOS, you use your own storage and are not charged by MediaLab for usage.
• See the article on Cloud Storage Support for details.

Storage Units

MediaLab storage usage is calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 2^30 bytes.

This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB), defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Similarly, 1 TB is 2^40 bytes, i.e. 1024 GBs.