KeyCDN’s Credit System Explained

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about KeyCDN’s credit system. At KeyCDN we strive to be as transparent as possible and therefore educating our customers about how our credit system works is very important. If you’re curious to learn more about our credit system including what a credit is, how to purchase credits, how to use credits, and more, then this guide is for you.

What Is a KeyCDN Credit?

1 KeyCDN credit equals 1 USD. KeyCDN credits can be used for a few different purposes. Most commonly, KeyCDN customers will purchase credits in order to use them towards CDN bandwidth (starting at $0.04/GB or 0.04 credits per GB). However, you can also use KeyCDN credits towards other things including:

• Paying for additional zones (more than 3 zones cost 1 credit/zone/month extra)
• Log forwarding (charged at 3 credits per day)
• CDN push zone storage (down to 0.09 credits/GB/month)
• KeyCDN consulting fees

The items above are the only things that KeyCDN charges for. All other features that KeyCDN rolls out are worked into the bandwidth pricing and therefore do not cost any extra.

How To Purchase Credits

There are three options in total that you can use to purchase credits. Two of which are quite commonly used and one of which is geared towards customers who don’t mind making larger up-front payments. On the Billing page within the KeyCDN dashboard, you will see two payment options:

• Credit Card
• PayPal

KeyCDN also provides the option to make a bank transfer payment. In order to use this option, the payment amount must be minimum $1000. You can activate this option by contacting us via a support request or by filling out our contact form.

To learn more about buying KeyCDN credits and the differences between manual and automated payments, read out complete Buy Credits guide.

Invoicing

When it comes to invoicing, KeyCDN provides you with 3 options (each available in PDF format). We have a dedicated invoicing guide which goes over all of the details you need to know about invoicing. However, at a high-level, KeyCDN allows you to choose between:

• Automated email invoices
• Manual invoicing viewing
• Bank transfer invoices

How To Use Credits

As mentioned above, KeyCDN credits can be used for few different things. Although, primarily credits are used towards CDN bandwidth. Once your site or web application is integrated with KeyCDN, you’ll be able to start delivering assets via out network. As you deliver assets using your CDN URL, traffic is accumulated and charged based on usage. It should be noted that KeyCDN only charges for outbound traffic.

You can check how many credits you are being charged by going to the Overview page in the dashboard. There, you have a credit chart which shows your remaining credit balance in a graph or your can switch to a table view to get a more granular breakdown.

In the table view above we can see credits being used for 3 separate charges.

• The first item under “Type” is storage. This charge refers to the storage cost of a push zone for 1 day. It is Dependant on how many GBs of content you have in your push zones which will determine what your storage cost is. Remember, pull zones do not incur storage charges, only push zones.
• The second item under “Type” is traffic. This charge refers to the amount of CDN bandwidth all of your zones collectively use in 1 day. This charge encompasses traffic for both push and pull zones.
• The third and last item in the above table is for additional zones. This charge occurs when you have more than 5 zones active in your KeyCDN account. Additional zones cost $1/zone/month which means that the user in this example has a total of 9 zones. Zone charges occur at the first of every month so if you see a sudden drop in your available credits, check the credits table and verify if you’ve incurred an additional zone charge.

The charges within the KeyCDN credit chart are updated hourly, therefore you can check this multiple times a day to get an update on how many credits are being used.

Do Credits Expire?

Credits do expire after 1 year. However, if a payment is made before the 1 year period is up, then your remaining credit balance will carry forward for another year.

For example, let’s say you make a payment on October 15, 2017. Your credits won’t expire until October 15, 2018. However, if your 1 year period is coming up and you still have a credit balance then you can make a payment to retain them. Let’s say you make a payment on October 10, 2018, then your new credits and your old credits won’t expire until October 10, 2019.

Credit Notifications

KeyCDN sends out email notifications to alert you of your credit status. We have the following 3 credit alert notifications in place:

1. Credit expiry alert: We will send out an email notification 7 days prior to expiry to give you a heads up about your credit expiration. You can then choose to either make another payment to prolong your existing credits, use up your credits before they expire, or simply let them expire.
2. Low credits alert: You will receive an alert when your balance reaches 0. However, we don’t stop content delivery until you have a negative balance of 40% from your last payment.
3. Negative balance alert: KeyCDN sends out 2 more notifications besides just the initial Low credits alert. Another notification is sent out once your account balance reaches negative 20% from your last payment and the final alert will notify you that your account has been set to inactive which gets sent out 7 days after the first alert.