Where your recordings live, and for how long

People treat cloud recording like a hard drive that never fills up. It is not. A recording is a blob with a clock on it: it takes space the moment the stream ends, and it ages out when your plan’s retention window closes. If you run shows weekly, that clock is part of production planning — same as bitrate and scene layouts.

This post is the plain map of where ApexStream stores your captures, how long they stay, and what actually happens when you hit a cap. No soft language. Just the limits that ship today.

Recording is not free storage

On ApexStream, cloud recording starts on Hobby. Free can multistream and use Web Studio with the Free watermark, but it does not get cloud captures. That is intentional: recording is a storage product with a lifecycle, not a side effect of going live.

When cloud recording is enabled for your plan, the pipeline writes the finished session into your account’s recording store after the stream ends. Local recording is a separate path — Creator and above can pull a local file while cloud recording still lands in the account. ISO guest tracks (separate per-guest audio) exist only on Scale and Enterprise. Everything else in this article is about the cloud copy: the one that shows up in your history and feeds tools like AI Clips and Podcast Studio’s draft-episode bridge.

A recording is not “safe forever.” It is safe for your plan’s retention window, inside your plan’s storage budget.

Retention windows by plan

Retention is a hard day count from when the recording becomes available. After that day count, the file is eligible for deletion. We do not keep a shadow copy past the window for Free through Scale. Enterprise is the exception at a year of retention, because long-running ops and compliance workflows need a longer flight log — not because “forever” is free.

• Free: no cloud recording (nothing to retain)
• Hobby: 15 days
• Creator: 15 days
• Scale: 30 days
• Enterprise: 365 days

Notice Hobby and Creator share the same 15-day window. The jump from Hobby to Creator is not “keep files longer.” It is more destinations, 4K encoder paths, AI Clips quotas, Podcast Studio Magic tools at Studio Sound tier, local recording, and a larger storage bucket. If you upgrade thinking the clock gets longer, you will be disappointed. If you upgrade because you need more room and more production tools inside the same two-week window, you are buying the right thing.

Scale’s 30 days is the first meaningful retention step for people who batch-edit. Weekly shows that need two weeks of buffer before an edit session fit Scale more cleanly than they fit Creator. Enterprise’s 365 days is for teams that treat archives as operational history — Flight Log style review over a full year, not a weekend dump of VODs.

Storage caps are separate from retention

Retention answers “how long.” Storage answers “how much.” You can expire early because you ran out of bytes even if the day clock has time left. Caps today:

• Free: 5 GB (general account storage; still no cloud recording)
• Hobby: 25 GB
• Creator: 100 GB
• Scale: 500 GB
• Enterprise: 10 TB

Rough mental math: a clean 1080p multistream session with Web Studio or an encoder ingest is often a few GB per hour depending on bitrate and whether you keep higher-quality masters. A Creator on a two-hour weekly show can fill 100 GB faster than people expect if they also keep AI Clips exports and Podcast Studio drafts in the same storage envelope. Scale’s 500 GB is the “I stream several times a week and still want headroom” bucket. Enterprise’s 10 TB is for high-volume or long-retention archives that would thrash any consumer plan.

When you approach the cap, new recordings still matter more than old ones you never downloaded. The operational habit that works: after a good show, download the MP4s you care about within a few days, push keepers to your own archive, and let the cloud copy age out on schedule. AI Clips outputs are downloads — they are not a second social publish path — so treat clip exports the same way: pull the 9:16 MP4s you want, do not assume the account is a permanent clip library.

How length and resolution interact with the budget

Plan limits on stream length and resolution feed storage whether you notice them or not.

• Stream length: Free 2h, Hobby 6h, Creator 8h, Scale 10h, Enterprise 24h
• Encoder resolution: Free 720p; Hobby 1080p; Creator and above up to 4K
• Web Studio resolution: Free and Hobby effectively 720p-class studio output; Creator and above 1080p in Studio

A Scale host running a 10-hour 1080p day will burn storage differently than a Hobby host running two hours at 1080p. Retention does not stretch because the file is large. A 40 GB day still expires on day 30 on Scale. The file does not earn extra life for being expensive to store.

Podcast Studio sits on the same family of recordings: stream capture becomes a draft episode, then you edit transcript, silence, and chapters. That draft still lives inside plan storage and retention logic. Pro Audio (DAW master upload and stems) is a paid add-on on lower tiers and included on Scale and Enterprise — useful for masters, but masters are large. If you upload stems casually, watch the meter.

What we optimize for in the pipeline

From the engineering side, recording storage is a lifecycle system, not a dump folder. The design goals are boring on purpose:

1. Finish the file after the stream ends so the object is complete before tools like AI Clips or Podcast Studio attach to it.
2. Enforce plan retention as a real policy, not a soft “we might clean up later.”
3. Keep Free honest: multistreaming without pretending Free includes a cloud VOD archive.
4. Keep Enterprise on a year-long window without rewriting the entire product as a tape archive business.

That means we will not market “unlimited storage” or “never expires.” Those phrases break the moment a host runs a month of high-bitrate shows. Honest caps beat surprise deletions that nobody can explain.

// Mental model (not a public API)
recording.available_until = created_at + plan.retention_days
recording.bytes_count     toward plan.storage_bytes
if storage full → new writes fail or block until space frees
if past available_until → object eligible for purge

You do not configure self-serve key rotation or magic “pin forever” toggles today. You choose a plan whose window and bucket match how you work, and you download keepers on purpose.

A practical workflow that respects the clock

Run the show. Confirm the cloud recording appears when the session ends. If the cut is good, download it within 48 hours while the show is still in your head. Export the AI Clips you actually want. If the audio is podcast material, open Podcast Studio, clean the draft, publish to your RSS path, and treat the edited episode as the long-term asset — not the raw multistream capture.

On Hobby and Creator, assume a two-week shelf. On Scale, assume a month. On Enterprise, assume a year of operational history, not infinite personal nostalgia. If you need files longer than your plan window, your archive lives outside the product: local disk, object storage you control, or an offline drive. ApexStream’s job is reliable production storage with clear aging, not a second home photo library.

Retention and storage are product features with teeth. Use the window. Watch the meter. Download what matters. The recordings that survive are the ones you treated as work product, not the ones you hoped the cloud would babysit forever.