Streaming is unpredictable. A normal week looks like a normal week, and then one of your videos catches fire on social. Or a guest podcast you appeared on goes live. Or your church runs a wedding broadcast that triples the usual congregation. Or your fitness class picks up a hundred new sign-ups for a single workshop.
Whatever the reason, the result is the same. Your monthly plan was sized for the usual, and now you need more. Today. Not after a renegotiated subscription, not after the next billing cycle. Today.
That is exactly what our new One-Time plans are for.
A One-Time plan is a single, standalone purchase that adds bandwidth and storage to your WpStream account immediately. No new subscription. No plan switch. No support ticket. You buy it, the credit lands in your account within seconds, and you keep streaming.
And you don’t need an active subscription to buy one. If you only stream occasionally, a quarterly conference, a seasonal event, an annual fundraiser, you can run your entire WpStream usage on One-Time plans alone, with no recurring monthly bill in between. The credit just sits on your account until you use it.
We’ve spent the last few months redesigning how additional credit works inside WpStream, and the One-Time plans are the result. Here’s what they are, why we built them the way we did, and where they fit alongside the subscription plans.
The problem with hitting your limit
Until now, when you ran out of bandwidth before the end of your billing month, you had three options. None of them was good.
You could upgrade to a bigger plan. That solved the immediate problem, but it committed you to a higher monthly cost forever, even when the spike was a single event that would never repeat. You could wait until the next renewal, and lose the audience that was trying to watch in the meantime. Or you could contact our support team and ask us to grant extra capacity by hand. We’ve always been willing to do that. But it’s a slow, awkward workflow, and it depends on someone being awake to answer.
None of those options match how creators actually use the platform. A church wants to broadcast a wedding next Saturday. A fitness instructor knows the New Year sign-up surge is coming. A live-event producer has a one-night-only stream that will outstrip an entire month of normal traffic.
These are predictable, planned, time-bound events. The right answer to a planned event is a self-serve, one-click top-up. Not a permanent upgrade, and not a workaround. The One-Time plans are exactly that.
What you get
When you buy a One-Time plan, two things happen at once. Your available bandwidth goes up. And your storage cap goes up too, if the tier’s storage value is higher than what you have today.
There are four tiers, and they’re designed to mirror the four subscription plans. That’s deliberate: you can think about them in the same units you already understand.
- Lite One-Time: +100 GB bandwidth, raises your storage cap to 2 GB.
- Plus One-Time: +250 GB bandwidth, raises your storage cap to 10 GB.
- Pro One-Time: +1 TB bandwidth, raises your storage cap to 50 GB.
- Ultra One-Time: +3 TB bandwidth, raises your storage cap to 250 GB.
On the Plus monthly plan with a one-night event that you think will use roughly another month’s worth of capacity? Buy Plus One-Time. On the Lite plan with a big quarter coming up? Pro One-Time will carry you through. The numbers are intentionally familiar, so the decision is fast.
What happens to your bandwidth at renewal?
This is the question that mattered most to us when we were designing the feature, and it’s the one we spent the most time getting right. Buy a One-Time plan on the 15th of the month, with a subscription that renews on the 30th. What happens to the bandwidth you haven’t used yet?
Our answer is simple, and we think it’s the only honest one: your One-Time credit is yours, and it persists across renewals.
Here’s the mechanics. Your subscription bandwidth gets consumed first. Your One-Time bandwidth sits behind it as a reserve. When the subscription bucket empties, the One-Time reserve kicks in. That’s the sequence. When your subscription renews next month, the plan bucket fills up again, and your One-Time reserve is still there, untouched, exactly where you left it. It will sit there for as long as you need it.
We did consider the alternative: burn through the One-Time credit first, then let the subscription refresh on top. We rejected it. That design would mean buying a One-Time plan on the 15th and renewing on the 30th gives you back roughly the same amount of bandwidth you started with, which defeats the entire point. The One-Time plans are a separate purchase, so they behave like one. You paid for it, you keep it.
That rule has one important corollary. If you cancel your subscription, downgrade to a smaller plan, or switch tiers entirely, your One-Time credit goes with you. It isn’t attached to any specific subscription. It belongs to your account.
Storage works on a floor, not a meter
Storage follows a slightly different principle than bandwidth, because storage is a cap, not a consumable. You either have room for that next video upload or you don’t.
So when you buy a One-Time plan, the storage portion raises your cap to the tier’s storage value, but only if that value is higher than what you have today. If your existing cap is already at or above the tier’s value, the storage portion is simply skipped. We never lower a cap. Whatever the highest storage value ever granted to you through a One-Time purchase becomes a floor your account will not drop below, as long as you remain a subscriber.
An example makes this concrete. You’re on the Lite plan with 2 GB of storage, and you buy Pro One-Time to upload a back-catalogue of fifty videos. Your storage cap goes up to 50 GB, and the floor is set to 50 GB. Later you switch to the Plus plan, which on its own gives you 10 GB. Your cap stays at 50 GB, because the One-Time floor is higher than what the Plus plan grants. The plan change benefits you in bandwidth. It cannot take away storage you’ve already paid for.
The same applies to cancellations and on-hold periods. Take a break, and your stored videos don’t get deleted and your purchased storage doesn’t disappear. When you come back, the floor is exactly where you left it.
We call this “I paid for it, I keep it,” and it’s now consistent everywhere in the system, not just at cancellation time.
When does all of this happen?
Instantly. The moment a One-Time order is marked paid, the credit is applied to your account and the dashboard reflects the new totals. No logging out, no aggressive refreshing, no waiting for an overnight job.
Bandwidth is available for your next live stream. Storage cap is available for your next upload. The order shows up in your purchase history alongside your subscription invoices. And on the bandwidth widget, your plan allocation and your One-Time reserve are shown as two separate numbers, so you can see exactly how much of each remains.
A few practical notes
Buy as many as you want. There’s no monthly cap, no “one per account” restriction, and no waiting period between purchases, so you can pick up a One-Time plan as often as you need one.
Some of our heaviest live-event customers buy a fresh One-Time plan the day before each major broadcast. Some buy one a quarter to keep a permanent buffer above their plan. Both patterns work, and both will keep working the way you expect.
What we are not changing
A note on what the One-Time plans do not do, because the boundary matters.
A One-Time plan does not change your subscription. It doesn’t upgrade you to a higher tier permanently, it doesn’t change your monthly billing amount, and it doesn’t move your renewal date.
So if you decide that your higher usage is here to stay, if the spike turns into the new baseline, the right move is to upgrade your subscription, not to keep buying One-Time plans every month. Subscriptions are cheaper per gigabyte than One-Time purchases for sustained use, by design. The One-Time plans are tuned for bursts: the wedding, the special event, the back-catalogue upload, the unexpected viral moment.
We think that’s the right division. Subscriptions for the steady state, One-Time plans for the spikes. Each one priced for what it is.
Available today
The One-Time plans are live in your account right now. You’ll find them in the same area as your subscription plans on the WpStream portal: Lite One-Time, Plus One-Time, Pro One-Time, and Ultra One-Time.
Purchase is a normal checkout. Pick the tier, complete payment, and your new totals show up in your dashboard immediately.
We’re glad to put this in your hands. It’s the result of a lot of careful thinking about what makes additional credit feel fair, predictable, and permanent, and we hope it removes one more piece of friction between you and a great broadcast.
As always, if you have feedback or run into anything that doesn’t match what you expected, we want to hear from you. The dashboard, the bandwidth split, and the storage floor are all live and observable on your account. But the only number that ultimately matters is whether the next stream goes out cleanly. The One-Time plans exist so that it does.
Happy streaming.