> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://livepeerfoundation-d4522ba3.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Set competitive pricing

> Price video and AI work so gateways select you — without leaving money on the table or pricing yourself out.

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.

## 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.

<Tip>
  Survey the market before setting anything. Check live per-pixel rates for comparable orchestrators
  at [tools.livepeer.cloud](https://tools.livepeer.cloud/ai/network-capabilities) and on the
  [Explorer](https://explorer.livepeer.org), then price near or slightly below the going rate.
</Tip>

## Video transcoding price

Set with `-pricePerUnit`, in **wei per pixel** — not ETH.

```bash theme={null}
-pricePerUnit 1000          # a typical starting point is ~500–2,000 wei/pixel
-autoAdjustPrice=true       # optional: adjust to network conditions automatically
```

<Warning>
  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.
</Warning>

### 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`.)

## AI capability price

AI is priced **per pipeline and per model** in `aiModels.json` via the `price_per_unit` field (wei
per unit). Example:

```json theme={null}
{
  "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.

## Per-gateway pricing

Commercial orchestrators can negotiate a different rate with a specific high-volume gateway,
independent of the base network price:

```bash theme={null}
-pricePerGateway='{"0xGatewayAddress": 800}'
```

## 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.

<Note>
  `-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.
</Note>

## 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.

## Next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Economics" icon="coins" href="/network/explanation/economics">
    How fee revenue splits with your delegators.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Not receiving jobs?" icon="circle-question" href="/network/reference/faq">
    Price is one of four common causes — check them all.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>