Why a 61 second file costs two dubbing minutes

A 61 second file costs 2 credits. Not 1.02, not 1.1. Two.

That's rounding up to the whole minute, and it's the first of four rules hiding behind the phrase "per minute" that every vendor sets differently. The other three are the point at which you are charged, what happens if the dubbing service measures a different duration than your file player reported, and whether the balance you bought expires.

Most pricing pages answer one of the four. Here are all of ours, including the one that costs you money.

Does dubbing billing round up?

Yes, always, to the whole minute, with a minimum of one credit per file.

The function that does it is one line:

def seconds_to_credits(seconds: float) -> int:
    return max(1, math.ceil(seconds / 60))

So a 9 second clip is 1 credit. A 61 second file is 2. A 5 minute 1 second file is 6.

There's no partial-minute billing and no per-second tier. If your content is lots of short clips, this rule is against you: ten 40 second clips cost 10 credits, while the same 400 seconds as one file costs 7. Something to check before you cut your footage into pieces for a dubbing run.

The reason it's ceil rather than round is that the underlying service bills us by the dubbed minute, so rounding down on any file would mean charging less than the job cost. Not a generous rule, but a consistent one.

When am I charged?

At confirm, not at upload.

Uploading a file costs nothing. You get an estimated cost back, based on a duration read from the file itself, and nothing has left your balance yet. You are charged when you confirm the job, which is also when it goes to the dubbing service.

Then it gets reconciled, which is the part most pricing pages leave out.

We estimate the duration from your file. The dubbing service returns the duration it measured. Those two numbers can disagree, and the difference is then settled: if their measurement is longer you're charged the extra, if it's shorter the difference goes back to your balance.

You are billed on measured audio, never on our estimate. That works both directions, and the direction that gives you money back is the same code path as the one that takes it.

What if the job fails?

The whole charge comes back, automatically, without you asking.

A job that fails at the dubbing service is refunded and marked failed in your history. A job that never completes is refunded too: there's a six hour hard timeout, and hitting it refunds what was charged rather than leaving credits sitting against a job that produced nothing.

Failure at submission time is also covered. If the submission itself errors, the credits deducted a moment earlier are returned before the job is marked failed.

This is why a trial run costs nothing if it doesn't produce a usable file. The refund runs on its own, with no support ticket and no claim to file.

Do dubbing credits expire?

No, and there's no subscription.

You buy a block of minutes and spend them whenever. There's no monthly clock, no forfeit at the end of a period, and no plan that lapses. What we sell is one-off packages, not tiers with recurring billing.

That is a bigger difference than it sounds for anyone dubbing irregularly. A monthly allowance you don't use is money gone. Credits sitting in an account still spend in six months. If your localization work comes in bursts, around a launch or a course release, that's the difference between paying for what you used and paying for the calendar.

Current package sizes and prices are on the pricing page rather than in this post, because a number in an article ages badly and a wrong price is worse than no price.

What to compare when you shop around

These four rules are where per-minute pricing diverges between vendors, so they're the questions to put to anyone you're comparing:

Does the headline rate round up, and at what granularity? Is the charge taken on upload, on confirmation, or on delivery? If the vendor's measurement of your file disagrees with yours, who absorbs the difference? And does the balance expire, or convert to a subscription after a period?

A vendor who publishes all four is telling you something. A vendor whose pricing page shows a rate and nothing else is leaving you to discover the rest after you've paid.

One thing we won't claim: that this is the cheapest way to dub a file. It isn't. There are tools with a lower per-minute rate, and if raw rate is your only criterion, they'll win on it. What's here is prepaid minutes, no subscription, no expiry, billing settled against measured audio, and a refund path that runs without a support ticket.

Working out what a project will cost

The arithmetic is per file and per language. One job takes one file and one target language, so a 12 minute video into 5 languages is 5 jobs of 12 credits, not one job of 12. Round each file up individually before you add them together, because the rounding happens per job.

If you're planning a specific pair, the guides have the detail: dubbing SaaS content from English to German and dubbing YouTube videos from English to Spanish are two of the most common starting points, and the use case index has the rest.

FAQ

Does a 61 second file really cost two minutes?

Yes. Durations are rounded up to the whole minute, with a minimum of one credit per file, so anything over 60 seconds costs 2 credits. The trade-off is worth planning around: several short clips cost more than the same total length in one file.

When am I charged for a dubbing job?

At the moment you confirm the job, not when you upload the file. Uploading gives you an estimate and costs nothing. The confirmed charge is then reconciled against the duration the dubbing service measures, so the final amount reflects measured audio rather than our estimate.

What happens to my credits if the job fails?

They're refunded automatically, including when a job hits the six hour timeout without producing a file. The job shows as failed in your history and the credits are back in your balance without you contacting anyone.

Do the credits expire?

No. There's no subscription and no expiry date, so a balance bought for one project is still spendable on the next one months later.