Ariadne Mark has no software licence fee or per-export Ariadne API charge. You run the toolkit on your infrastructure. Your operating budget covers compute, hosting, storage, verification and any production signing or timestamp services you use.
Measured CPU work for 1,000 daily exports
The following illustration uses the 0.7.2a1 measurements from 11 November 2026: a 1024 × 683 PNG and a ten-second 720p/30 fps synthetic video. The test used a two-CPU container on an EC2 m6a.large. Warm values come from two resident repeats after the first job.
| Measured input / profile | Warm export, wall time | Warm export CPU, median | CPU-hours for 1,000 identical exports |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1024 × 683 PNG | 0.73 s | 1.10 CPU s | 0.31 CPU h |
| 10 s video · Economy5s | 9.09 s | 13.24 CPU s | 3.68 CPU h |
| 10 s video · Economy2s | 13.82 s | 21.54 CPU s | 5.98 CPU h |
| 10 s video · Resilient | 104.44 s | 184.67 CPU s | 51.30 CPU h |
The last column is arithmetic: 1,000 × measured CPU seconds / 3,600. It is CPU-hours, not elapsed hours, a throughput promise or a cloud invoice. Different media, concurrent jobs and production signing can change the result. Read the full protocol and raw data.
Estimate your own worker budget
Use:
CPU-hours/day = exports/day × measured CPU seconds/export ÷ 3,600
For actual capacity, measure completed jobs per hour at your chosen worker/concurrency limit. Leave room for spikes, retries and verification. Two vCPUs do not guarantee twice the throughput, and an always-on VM is usually billed for its allocated time rather than only busy CPU seconds.
Separate the first job from resident repeats. The Python integration reuses an SDK inside a worker; a per-file CLI subprocess may pay more startup overhead. A Node.js app can keep the same queue while delegating media work to that worker.
What else costs money?
| Item | What to provision or measure |
|---|---|
| Export workers | Cold/warm wall time, CPU and memory for your actual dimensions, duration, FPS and codec |
| Verifier | Capacity for independent checks, long negative scans, concurrency and bounded uploads |
| Storage and registry | Published media, receipts, manifests, recovery records and backups |
| Signing identity | Eligibility, certificate renewal, key handling and any conformance work |
| Trusted timestamps | Required request volume, vendor quota or price, latency and retry behavior |
| Delivery | CDN/app transformations and any separate final renditions that must be marked |
The public image playground is a demo, not a production marking service or a hosted verifier SLA for your app. Deploy and size your own endpoint through the connected kit.
Which video profile uses less compute?
Economy5s and Economy2s reduce inference to selected marking windows. Resilient computes a fresh signal on every frame and used more CPU in this test. All three still decode and encode the complete file.
Choose with both cost and delivery behavior in view. Short excerpts can miss Economy windows; cropping and removal can defeat recovery in any profile. The profile documentation and evidence describe those limits. A low-cost mode is not a separate legal certification.
Production signing is a separate setup step
The SDK's production export policy currently requires trusted timestamps. This is a toolkit implementation choice, not a statement that every law mandates this exact per-file TSA architecture. Obtain terms and capacity from the certificate/TSA provider you actually use; this page assumes no current vendor price or unlimited free quota.
The real identity/enrollment and authenticated TSA route still need qualification for your deployment. Start with production onboarding and account for external service costs before committing to a launch date.
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