How AIOZ Pin Billing Works: Storage, Bandwidth, Pins
AIOZ Pin billing has no subscription plans to pick between, no monthly commitment, and no credit card. It runs on three flat rates against a wallet balance you top up yourself: storage, bandwidth, and pinned files past a free threshold. This article covers exactly how each is calculated and charged, the mechanics, not the cost-cutting tips already covered in AIOZ's earlier payment optimization post, so you know precisely what you're paying for before you commit real files to it.
TL;DR:
- Storage costs $20 per TB per month, bandwidth costs $20 per TB, both prorated daily
- The first 40,000 pinned files are free, then $0.10 per additional 1,000
- You fund an account with AIOZ tokens, and your wallet balance is deducted daily based on actual usage
The Three Things You're Billed For
AIOZ Pin's payment documentation lays out three separate charges:
| What | Rate | Billed |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $20 per TB per month | Prorated daily |
| Bandwidth | $20 per TB | Prorated daily |
| Pinned files | First 40,000 free, then $0.10 per additional 1,000 | Ongoing, once you cross the threshold |
There are no bundled plans, no "up to X included" tiers the way Pinata or Filebase structure their pricing. You're charged for what you actually use, at the same rate whether you're storing 10GB or 10TB.
How Daily Proration Actually Works
Both storage and bandwidth are "divided daily," per AIOZ's own documentation, meaning the $20/TB monthly rate gets split across the days in that month and deducted incrementally rather than charged as one lump sum on a billing date. Practically, this means your wallet balance drops a little every day based on how much you're storing and transferring right then, not on a fixed monthly invoice cycle. If you delete a large amount of data mid-month, your daily storage charge drops immediately rather than continuing at the old rate until a renewal date.
The 40,000-Pin Threshold
Pinned file count is billed separately from storage and bandwidth, and it's the one place AIOZ Pin offers something free: the first 40,000 pinned files cost nothing. Past that, it's $0.10 per additional 1,000 pins, a cost that's independent of how large each individual file is. For most projects, especially NFT collections in the thousands rather than tens of thousands of items, this threshold means pin-count charges rarely come up at all, storage and bandwidth are where the real cost lives.
Funding Your Account
There's no credit card option. You fund an AIOZ Pin account by depositing AIOZ tokens to an auto-generated wallet address, with a minimum deposit just over 0.01 AIOZ tokens. Once received, your deposit is converted to credits at the AIOZ/USDT market rate at the time of the transaction, and your wallet balance is what daily usage gets deducted from directly. AIOZ's Billing API section exposes three read endpoints for tracking this programmatically: historical usage data, top-up history, and current-month usage, each returning fields like total_storage, bandwidth_usage, and storage_cost, useful if you want to monitor spend without checking the dashboard manually.
What Each Billing API Endpoint Actually Returns
The three read endpoints mentioned above cover different windows on the same underlying usage data, worth knowing which one to reach for. The historical-usage endpoint returns a time series, useful for charting spend trends over weeks or months rather than a single number. Top-up history returns each deposit event, the AIOZ amount sent, the USDT-equivalent credit it produced at that deposit's conversion rate, and when it landed, the record to check if a balance ever looks off from what you expected to have funded. Current-month usage is the one most integrations actually poll regularly, since it's the live figure that answers "how much have I spent so far this billing period" without needing to sum a historical series yourself. Pulling from the right one instead of reconstructing it from a broader dataset is the difference between a dashboard that's simple to build and one that's doing unnecessary work.
What This Actually Costs at Real Usage
At 500GB storage and 200GB bandwidth a month, well within what a small application would use, the math is $10 (storage) plus $4 (bandwidth), $14 total. At 5TB storage and 2TB bandwidth, a considerably larger deployment, it's $100 plus $40, $140 total. Because both rates are flat and linear, the cost scales directly with usage with no step-function jumps at plan boundaries, what you'd pay at 2x the data is close to exactly 2x the bill. The AIOZ Pin vs Pinata comparison works through where this flat-rate model beats and loses to a bundled-tier competitor at different usage levels, worth a look if you're actively comparing costs against another provider.
The Wallet Side of This Bill
Everything above assumes a funded account, but the funding mechanism itself, depositing AIOZ tokens rather than swiping a card, has its own real mechanics worth understanding: a minimum deposit threshold, a conversion rate locked in at deposit time rather than spend time, and behavior for deposits below that minimum that isn't obvious until you've hit it. That side of the picture is covered in full in this blog's dedicated look at AIOZ Pin's wallet billing, worth reading alongside this article rather than assuming "fund with tokens" is the whole story.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does AIOZ Pin cost per month? Storage and bandwidth are both $20 per TB per month, prorated daily. There's no fixed monthly minimum beyond what you actually use, and the first 40,000 pinned files are free.
Does AIOZ Pin have a free tier? Not for storage or bandwidth. The only free allowance is 40,000 pinned files; storage and bandwidth are billed from the first byte.
Can I pay for AIOZ Pin with a credit card? No. You fund your account by depositing AIOZ tokens to a wallet address, with a minimum deposit just over 0.01 AIOZ.
How is AIOZ Pin's pricing billed, monthly or daily? Daily. Both storage and bandwidth rates are prorated and deducted from your wallet balance incrementally based on actual daily usage, not charged as one monthly lump sum.
What happens after I pin more than 40,000 files? You're charged $0.10 per additional 1,000 pinned files beyond the first 40,000, separate from your storage and bandwidth costs.
Can I track my AIOZ Pin usage and spend programmatically? Yes, through the Billing API section, which exposes historical usage, top-up history, and current-month usage data as separate read endpoints.
Related Reading
- AIOZ Pin vs Pinata: IPFS Pinning Service Compared 2026 - a worked cost comparison against a bundled-tier competitor at different usage levels
- How AIOZ Pin Works: Pinning, Gateways, and NFT Tools - the product mechanics these charges apply to
- AIOZ Pin for Developers: API, SDK, and CLI Explained - where the Billing API fits among AIOZ Pin's other API sections
- How AIOZ Pin's Wallet Billing Actually Works - the funding side of this bill: deposits, conversion, and the wallet itself
- Optimizing IPFS Payment Costs Through AIOZ Pin Solutions - why IPFS needs a paid incentive layer at all, with a worked monthly-cost example
References
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