Usage and billing
What Midstream counts as a view, how active viewers are deduplicated, and what Early Access costs.
Midstream counts how much your scenes are actually being looked at. This page explains what is being counted, how, and what it has to do with your bill.
You will find the numbers in two places: Usage, which exists for a single project and for the whole workspace, and Billing & usage in workspace settings.
What the Usage page shows
| Total scene views | Every view in the selected range |
| Active scenes | Scenes that got at least one view in the range |
| Active users | Distinct people who viewed something in the range |
| Scene views chart | Views per day across the range |
| Most active scenes | The four most-viewed scenes, with when each was last opened |
Pick a range of 7, 30, or 90 days at the top of the page. Thirty is the default. Every number and the chart follow the range — nothing on the page is an all-time total.
The workspace page is the same view across every project you have.
What counts as a view
One view is one page opened inside an instance.
More precisely, it is one document navigation: a person landing on the instance, or clicking through to another page within your app while inside it. Images, stylesheets, fonts, and background requests your app makes are not views. Midstream's own control routes are not views.
Two things follow:
- Views are not unique people. The same reviewer opening the same instance three times over a week is three views. Clicking through four pages inside one instance is four views. Use Active users when you want people.
- Only instance traffic counts. Browsing scenes in the dashboard, opening a pull request view, or looking at a screenshot is not a view. A view means somebody was in your running app.
Ad blockers do not skew it
Views are counted first-party. The instance records the view itself as it serves the page — there is no analytics script in the page, no request to a tracker domain, and nothing for a content blocker to recognize and drop.
This matters because it makes the number honest in the direction people usually doubt. Third-party analytics undercounts exactly the audience Midstream is built for: engineers, who block trackers at a much higher rate than the general population. If your instance served the page, the view is counted.
How active viewers are deduplicated
Active users collapses many views down to distinct people, using whichever identity is available:
- Signed in to Midstream — deduplicated on the account. Every view that person makes, in any instance, counts as one person.
- Not signed in — deduplicated on a session cookie the instance sets in their browser the first time they arrive. Return visits to the same instance collapse onto that one session.
The consequence is worth knowing before you read too much into the number: that cookie is scoped to the instance's own hostname, so one signed-out person looking at two different scenes is counted as two active users. Signed-in viewers do not have this problem. If the count looks higher than the size of your team, you are probably looking at signed-out reviewers.
Views are recorded whether or not somebody is signed in — the identity only affects how they are deduplicated.
Billing
Midstream is in Early Access.
- There are no hard limits. No cap on scenes, captures, instances, views, or members. Reasonable use.
- Nothing changes without a conversation. Pricing will land before any limit does, and we will contact you well ahead of either. You will not discover a new plan by hitting a wall.
Workspace settings → Billing & usage shows your current plan and your workspace totals. If you are planning something large — a big test suite, a big team, a spike around a launch — tell us first and we will make sure it works.