Estimating pricing for Twilio Programmable Video – Twilio Support

Overview

Twilio's Programmable Video has no minimum fees, and only charges for what you use. This guide gives pricing information and estimates for a number of different use cases.

Notice: The estimates here are based on list pricing, but volume discounts are available. For full details, see the Programmable Video pricing page, or contact a Twilio Video expert.

What You Need To Know

Rooms and participants 🔗

Twilio Programmable Video pricing is based on two core concepts:

A Room represents a real-time audio, video, and/or screen-share session, and is the basic building block for a Programmable Video application. For a breakdown of the different room types, see Understanding Video Rooms (Twilio Docs).
A Participant represents client applications that are connected to a Room, and sharing audio and/or video media to the Room.

For full details on Programmable Video concepts, see our Twilio Video Basic Concepts Guide (Twilio Docs).

Group Rooms 🔗

Group Rooms are billed at $0.004 per Participant minute.

Participants are billed only for the time they are connected to a room, whether or not they are communicating. Participants are not charged for the bandwidth used, and/or the number of media tracks published or subscribed from the room.

Example Scenario	Pricing
2 Participants in a Group Room for 15 minutes	$0.004/min x 2 Participants x 15 min = Total: `$0.12`
6 Participants in a Group Room - 1 and 2 connect the first 15 minutes, 3 and 4 connect 10 minutes late, and stay connected for 20 additional minutes, 5 and 6 connect only for the last 5 minutes.	$0.004/min x (15min + 15min + 20min + 20min + 5min + 5min) = Total: `$0.32`
15 Participants in a Group Room for 60 minutes	$0.004/min x 15 Participants x 60 min = Total: `$3.60`

Participant Recordings 🔗

Group Room Participant Recordings is billed at $0.004 per recorded Participant minute. This charge is in addition to the standard Group Room Participant rate.

Billing for Group Room recording begins once a Participant publishes any media track - audio webcam/video, screencast, etc. - and continues as long as media tracks are being published. Participant Recordings can be enabled or disabled at any time using the Recording Rules API.

Example Scenario	Pricing
2 Participants communicating audio and video in a recorded Group Room for 20 minutes	$0.004/min x 2 Participants x (20min Room rate + 20min Recording rate) = Total: `$0.32`
3 Participants in a recorded Group Room for 20 minutes - 1 sends audio for only 5 minutes, 2 sends audio, video, and screen share for 20 minutes, 3 sends audio for 20 minutes, but their microphone is muted for 18 minutes.	$0.004/min x (20min + 20min + 20min Room rate + 5min +20min + 20min Recording rate) = Total: `$0.42`

Recording Compositions 🔗

Group Room Recording Compositions are billed at $0.01 per Composition minute.

Compositions combine the multiple Participant Recordings from a Group Room into a single file for playback or archiving. Compositions are billed by the duration of the final composed media file output, rather than the duration, number, or nature of the source Recordings.

Example Scenario	Pricing
A 10-minute long Composition mixing audio and video tracks from 12 different Participants	$0.01/min x 10 min = Total: `$0.10`
A 10-minute long Composition mixing only 1 audio track from 1 Participant	$0.01/min x 10 min = Total: `$0.10`

Media Storage 🔗

The first 10GB of Recordings and/or Compositions stored in the Twilio cloud is complimentary. Media storage greater than 10GB is charged at a rate of $0.00167 per GB per day. This is a daily charge.

To avoid additional storage charges, we recommend regularly downloading any media files you wish to keep, and then deleting the records. If the recordings and / or compositions are stored externally onto Amazon’s S3 servers, they will not incur this charge. See Storing into AWS S3 (Twilio Docs) for full details.

Public Key Encrypted Recordings & Compositions 🔗

Customer provided public key Media Encryption for both Recordings and Compositions is included in the Enterprise Edition Plan.

Programmable Voice Participants 🔗

Programmable Voice calls, both PSTN and SIP based, can be connected to a Video Group Room. The relevant Programmable Voice rate will be charged for the the inbound or outbound call leg and there is also a Video Group Rooms Participant minute charge.

Example Scenario	Pricing
1 Video participant in a Group Room for 15 minutes and 1 PSTN participant who dials in and is connected to the same Group Room.	$0.004/min x 2 Participants x 15 min + 1 inbound local call $0.0085/min x 15 min Total: `$0.2475`

Note: PSTN rates vary significantly, update the example above to match the PSTN rate for your location and use case.

Real-Time Transcriptions 🔗

Real-Time Transcriptions are billed at a $0.027 / min.

It applies for the duration (in minutes) that transcriptions are enabled in the Video Room with at least one participant connected
The charge is independent of the number of participants in the Room
The charge is independent of whether participants have their audio tracks published/unpublished or muted/muted
We do not charge for time segments when transcriptions are paused/stopped after having been previously started
The rate is the same regardless of which underlying vendor and transcription engine the developer selects.
Note: the rate is the same as Real-Time (Streaming) Transcriptions for Voice