Audio and Video Calling Pricing
Welcome to RC's real-time audio and video services. This document provides a detailed overview of the billing rules for RC's Call and Video Call services, including pricing, usage calculation methods, and important notes to help you better understand and manage your costs.
Video Calling pricing
The unit prices for audio and video usage are as follows:
| Usage type | Pricing, US$/1,000 participant minutes |
|---|---|
| Audio | 0.99 |
| Video HD | 3.99 |
| Video Full HD | 8.99 |
| Video 2K | 15.99 |
| Video 2K+ | 35.99 |
Cost calculation
Billing occurs monthly. At the end of each month, RC calculates the total duration of the audio and video usage (in minutes) for that month in all projects under your RC account.
Video usage is divided into four different types based on aggregate resolution and priced individually. After deducting the monthly 10,000 free-of-charge minutes that RC grants to every account, RC multiplies any remaining usage by its corresponding unit price and adds up the costs to get the total cost for that month.
The basic formula is shown here:
Monthly cost = audio minutes × audio unit price + video minutes of each type × video unit price of each type
Usage
In each Video Calling session, users communicate with each other in a Video Calling channel. RC measures the usage for each user from the moment they join a channel to the moment they leave it. If a user subscribes to video from other users in the channel, the usage is counted as video usage (of the applicable type); otherwise, the usage is counted as audio usage.
RC calculates usage based solely on a user’s subscriptions in the channels they join. Whether they publish streams does not matter.
Audio usage
Audio usage is the default rate at which users are billed for joining a channel. Any time a user spends in a channel where they do not subscribe to video is counted as audio usage, regardless of whether they actually subscribe to audio from another user.
Note that in channels with only one user, this usage is counted as audio usage, because the user does not subscribe to any video.
Video usage
Video usage is the amount of time that a user in a channel subscribes to video (of any type) from other users. When a user subscribes to both audio and video at the same time, RC only counts this as video usage.
RC calculates video usage for each user based on aggregate resolution. Aggregate resolution is the sum of the resolutions of all the video streams a user subscribes to at the same time, that is, the total number of pixels in the video streams the user receives. This calculation applies when a user subscribes to one video stream or multiple video streams.
Based on the aggregate resolution of all the video streams received, RC divides video into the following types and calculates the usage duration of each type separately:
| Video type | Aggregate resolution, px |
|---|---|
| High-definition (HD) | Less than or equal to 921,600 (1280 × 720) |
| Full High-definition (Full HD) | From greater than 921,600 (1280 × 720) to 2,073,600 (1920 × 1080) |
| 2K | From greater than 2,073,600 (1920 × 1080) to 3,686,400 (2560 × 1440) |
| 2K+ | From greater than 3,686,400 (2560 × 1440) to 8,847,360 (4096 × 2160) |
For example, if a user subscribes to two video streams with resolutions of 1280 × 720 and 1920 × 1080 at the same time, the aggregated resolution of the user is (1280 × 720) + (1920 × 1080) = 2,995,200. Because 2,995,200 is greater than 2,073,600 but less than 3,686,400, RC counts this video usage as 2K type and bills it at the 2K unit price.
If you expect your total monthly usage to exceed 2,000,000 minutes, contact customercare@rongcloud.io for additional discounts.
Reference
This section provides additional information for your reference.
Accuracy of usage duration
RC bills usage by the minute but records usage by the second. Monthly usage for billing is actually calculated by totaling each type of usage (in seconds) and then dividing by 60, rounding up to the nearest integer. For example, if the audio usage for a month is 59 seconds, then this is billed as 1 minute; if the HD video usage for a month is 61 seconds, then this is billed as 2 minutes. Therefore, the margin of error for usage of each type per month is less than 1 minute.
Aggregate video resolution in dual-stream use-cases
In dual-stream mode, the aggregate video resolution for each user is calculated as follows:
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If the user subscribes to the high-quality video stream, their aggregate resolution is calculated based on the resolution of the high-quality video sent by the host, regardless of the resulting video resolution on the user's end.
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If the user subscribes to the low-quality video stream, their aggregate resolution is calculated based on the resolution of the video received by the user.