What Is Data Consumption
Last Updated: 15/09/2026
What your subscription consumes is experiences: the times a visitor actually uses an ARShades feature on your site. Not gigabytes, not sessions, not unique visitors — those are things you can look at in the analytics, but they are not what is counted against your subscription.
Consumption used to be expressed in gigabytes. It is now counted in experiences, which is what you can see happening on your own site and what your credit is written in. Studio still shows some older wording until it is aligned.
The Three Experiences
| Experience | What counts as one |
|---|---|
| Try-on | A visitor opens the virtual try-on on one SKU. |
| View | The 3D model loads in the Viewer on a page. |
| Exploration | A visitor starts the VTO Explorer, with face capture. |
Each has its own weight. An exploration weighs more than the other two, because it loads many more models at once.
An experience counts when it opens. There is no minimum duration: a visitor who opens the try-on and leaves after two seconds has used one try-on. This is deliberate — it makes your count match what you can measure yourself on your own site, whichever way you integrated.
The Shared Credit
Try-on, View and Exploration all draw on the same balance of experiences, each at its own weight. The balance is available in full from the start of the period; it does not drip in month by month.
The PD Meter is the exception: measurements have their own separate quota. The two balances never convert into each other and never compensate for one another.
Mirror consumes nothing at all: a Mirror plan is per device.
Repeats
The same visitor reopening the same frame shortly afterwards does not count twice: within a short window, the same SKU reopened from the same browser is one try-on, and the same catalogue reopened is one exploration.
The View is the exception, and counts every time: it is a component of the page, and it is counted like a page view.
When the Credit Runs Out
What happens depends on your subscription, and the difference is deliberate.
| VTO Smart | VTO Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic top-up on | A data pack starts | A data pack starts |
| Automatic top-up off | The experiences stop until you top up | Nothing stops. The extra is billed at the end of the month at your contract rate |
On Smart, stopping means the try-on shows a message in the plugin, the 3D on the product page does not load and the shop's own image stays in its place, and the Explorer does not start. Your shop keeps working — it loses the ARShades features until you top up.
The Order Things Are Used In
- The included quota of the period.
- The data packs, oldest first, including after a renewal.
The included quota does not carry over at the end of the annual period. Data packs do: a pack you have paid for stays until it is used, as long as the subscription is active.
Warnings
You are warned at 80%, 90%, 95% and 100% of your credit, by email and in Studio. If a warning arrives at a bad moment — a campaign about to launch, a season starting — that is the moment to look at a data pack or at automatic top-up rather than wait for the stop.
Automatic top-up is optional, triggers below a threshold proportional to your quota, and uses the pack size you choose. There is no limit on how many times it can fire.
What You See in Studio
Studio shows, for your subscription: what is included and what has been consumed by type of experience, the warnings, the packs and the top-ups, and the PD Meter balance separately. See Subscription Details and Data Consumption.
Bandwidth is something ARShades watches internally to run the platform. It is not what you are charged on and not a unit you need to reason about: if you want to know whether a campaign is within your subscription, count experiences.
Related Pages
- Subscription Plans — where the credit of experiences comes from.
- Subscription Details and Data Consumption — reading the figures in Studio.
- Add-ons — data packs and modules.