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Price is one of the strongest levers on whether gateways send you jobs. Every gateway filters orchestrators against its own -maxPricePerUnit ceiling, then ranks the rest. Too high and you get no work; too low and you under-earn per job. This guide covers how to set each price.

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How gateways use your price

Gateways don’t assign jobs randomly. For each session they rank orchestrators by capability match, price, latency, performance history, and stake weight. Price is the lever you can change instantly — and the most common reason an otherwise healthy node receives nothing.
Survey the market before setting anything. Check live per-pixel rates for comparable orchestrators at tools.livepeer.cloud and on the Explorer, then price near or slightly below the going rate.

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Video transcoding price

Set with -pricePerUnit, in wei per pixel — not ETH. 
-pricePerUnit 1000          # a typical starting point is ~500–2,000 wei/pixel
-autoAdjustPrice=true       # optional: adjust to network conditions automatically
The number-one pricing mistake: entering the value in ETH (e.g. 0.0001) instead of wei. That prices you orders of magnitude above market, and gateways route around you with no error in your logs. Remember: 1 ETH = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei.

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Sanity-check the math

You’re paid per pixel of video you encode — so what a price means in ETH depends on the renditions a stream asks for. Work one example before you commit to a number. Say a gateway requests three output renditions at 30 fps: 
pixels per second = (1280×720 + 854×480 + 640×360) × 30 ≈ 46.9M px/s
pixels per hour   ≈ 46.9M × 3600 ≈ 1.69 × 10¹¹ px

at -pricePerUnit 1000 (wei/pixel):
1.69 × 10¹¹ px × 1,000 wei ≈ 1.69 × 10¹⁴ wei ≈ 0.00017 ETH per stream-hour
If your own calculation comes out at whole ETH per hour, your price is off by orders of magnitude — almost always the ETH-instead-of-wei mistake above. (Numbers are illustrative; actual pixel counts depend on the profiles each gateway requests, and pixelsPerUnit defaults to 1.)

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AI capability price

AI is priced per pipeline and per model in aiModels.json via the price_per_unit field (wei per unit). Example: 
{
  "capabilities_prices": [
    { "pipeline": "text-to-image", "model_id": "stabilityai/stable-diffusion-3-medium-diffusers", "price_per_unit": 4768371, "pixels_per_unit": 1 },
    { "pipeline": "audio-to-text", "model_id": "openai/whisper-large-v3", "price_per_unit": 15000, "pixels_per_unit": 1 }
  ]
}
Each pipeline/model pair is advertised and priced independently, so you can be aggressive on workloads your hardware runs efficiently and conservative on the rest.

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Per-gateway pricing

Commercial orchestrators can negotiate a different rate with a specific high-volume gateway, independent of the base network price: 
-pricePerGateway='{"0xGatewayAddress": 800}'

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Updating price on a running node

You can change price two ways:
  • Live, via livepeer_cli — select the update-price option and enter a new wei value. No restart.
  • On restart — change the -pricePerUnit flag.
-pricePerUnit sets the startup price. The on-chain price used for discovery is set during activation and can be adjusted separately in livepeer_cli. Keep them consistent so gateways see what you intend to charge.

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A sensible starting strategy

  1. Survey current rates for orchestrators with similar GPUs.
  2. Match or slightly undercut the median to start attracting sessions.
  3. Watch job flow in your logs and on the Explorer for a few rounds.
  4. Raise gradually once you have steady work and reliable performance — reputation and low latency let you command more.

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Next

Economics

How fee revenue splits with your delegators.

Not receiving jobs?

Price is one of four common causes — check them all.