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FIX ME - should just show pricing config & link to About/Economics & a guide on it

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Gateway Pricing and Fee Structure

Gateways in Livepeer set prices and pay fees through a multi-layered system that includes price limits, per-gateway pricing, and payment processing for both video transcoding and AI workloads. Gateways use a probabilistic micropayment system where they generate payment tickets for work done. The system supports both traditional video transcoding (per segment) and AI processing (per pixel) with different pricing models but unified payment infrastructure rpc.go:61-64.

Gateway Economics

Looking for information on how gateways earn fees for services?

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Gateway Configuration

Configurations a Gateway can set for pricing.

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Setting Price Limits For Work Performed by Orchestrators

Gateways set maximum prices they’re willing to pay through configuration flags in the transcodingConfig.json or directly in the CLI.

Price Configuration Flags

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-maxPricePerUnit
string
Maximum price per pixelsPerUnit (in wei integer or a custom currency format like 0.50USD or 0.02USD) for transcoding work livepeer.go:137
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-maxPricePerCapability
string
JSON list (or path to JSON congif file) of maximum prices per AI capability/model livepeer.go:138
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-ignoreMaxPriceIfNeeded
boolean
Allows exceeding max price if no orchestrator meets requirements livepeer.go:139

Go to Funding Your Gateway

How to fund your gateway and pay for Orchestrator workloads.

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Orchestrator Configuration & Price Information

A reference for Gateway Operators on how Orchestrators configure pricing and fees for services.

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Per-Gateway Pricing (can be set by Orchestrators)

Orchestrators can set specific prices for individual gateways using -pricePerGateway starter.go:915-926 
{  
  "gateways": [  
    {  
      "ethaddress": "0x123...",  
      "priceperunit": 0.5,  
      "currency": "USD",  
      "pixelsperunit": 1000000000000  
    }  
  ]  
}

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Price Calculation

The actual price calculation happens in the orchestrator’s priceInfo function orchestrator.go:357-431
  1. Checks for fixed prices per manifest ID
  2. Gets base price from orchestrator configuration
  3. For AI workloads, sums prices of individual capability/model pairs
  4. Applies auto-adjustment based on transaction costs if enabled

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Fee Payment Process

Gateways pay fees through different mechanisms depending on workload type: Video Transcoding AI Processing Payment Processing Flow
  1. Gateway sends payment with segment/request to orchestrator live_payment.go:96-114
  2. Orchestrator validates payment and updates balance segment_rpc.go:257-261
  3. Fees are debited from gateway’s balance account ai_http.go:568

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Dynamic Price Adjustment

Orchestrators can enable automatic price adjustments based on transaction costs orchestrator.go:408-431 
if !orch.node.AutoAdjustPrice {  
    return basePrice, nil  
}  
// Apply overhead multiplier based on tx costs  
overhead := big.NewRat(1, 1)  
if basePrice.Num().Cmp(big.NewInt(0)) > 0 {  
    txCostMultiplier, err := orch.node.Recipient.TxCostMultiplier(sender)  
    if txCostMultiplier.Cmp(big.NewRat(0, 1)) > 0 {  
        overhead = overhead.Add(overhead, new(big.Rat).Inv(txCostMultiplier))  
    }  
}