This article introduces the billing policy for the cloud recording service provided by Agora.
Agora calculates the billing of all projects under your Agora account monthly.
Billing for the cloud recording service begins once you use Agora Cloud Recording to record and save audio calls, group video calls, or interactive video streaming made via the Agora RTC SDK on your cloud storage. On the first day of each month, Agora sends you the bill via email, and five days later deducts the payment from your account. For details, see Billing, fee deduction, and account suspension.
At the end of each month, Agora calculates the service minutes of video and audio used by your projects on a monthly basis and makes the following charges:
Cost = video charges + audio charges = (video pricing × video service minutes) + (audio pricing × audio service minutes).
The pricing for audio and video are as follows:
Service type | Pricing ($US/1,000 minutes) |
---|---|
Recording audio | $1.49 |
Recording video |
|
Agora adds up the resolution of all the video streams recorded at the same time to get the aggregate resolution, which categorizes video as either HD or HD+:
Suppose that the recording server records the video of users A, B, C, and D in an RTC channel for 45 minutes. During the recording, the video resolution of the users changes, and the aggregate resolution is calculated as follows:
Phase 1
For the first 30 minutes, the recording server records the video of users A, B, and C. The video resolution of the users are as follows:
The aggregate resolution: (640 × 360) + (640 × 360) + (640 × 360) = 691,200.
Since 691,200 is smaller than 921,600, the aggregate resolution for the first 30 minutes falls into the category of HD, and is charged $5.99/1,000 minutes.
Phase 2
For the last 15 minutes, the recording server records the video of users A, B, and D. The video resolution of the users are as follows:
The aggregate resolution: (640 × 360) + (240 × 180) + (1280 × 720) = 1,195,200.
Since 1,195,200 is greater than 921,600, the aggregate resolution for the last 15 minutes falls into the category of HD+, and is charged $22.49/1,000 minutes.
Service minutes (accurate to seconds) are calculated from the time when the recording starts to the time when the recording stops in a channel.
Service minutes comprise the following:
If you create a recording session and record multiple audio and video streams at the same time in a channel, the total service minutes per streams are not additive. For example:
If you create multiple recording sessions and record multiple audio and video streams at the same time in a channel, the total service minutes multiply by the number of recording sessions. For example:
Use the following examples to better understand the billing policy for the Agora Cloud Recording service:
Example 1
Scenario: Four users join the channel at the same time and have a video call for 1,000 minutes. One cloud recording session joins the channel and records only the audio streams of the four users.
Cost: The recording service generates only charges for the audio minutes.
Billing = Audio pricing × audio minutes/1,000 × the number of recording sessions = $1.49 × 1,000/1,000 × 1 = $1.49
Example 2
Scenario: Four users join the channel at the same time and have a video call for 1,000 minutes. Two cloud recording sessions join the channel and record only the audio streams of the four users.
Cost: The recording service generates only charges for the audio minutes.
Billing = Audio pricing × audio minutes/1,000 × the number of recording sessions = $1.49 × 1,000/1,000 × 2 = $2.98
Example 3
Scenario: Four users join the channel at the same time and have a video call for 1,000 minutes. One cloud recording session joins the channel and records the audio and video streams of the four users. The video resolution of each user is 640 × 360.
Cost: The recording service generates charges for the video minutes. The aggregate video resolution is 4 × (640 × 360) = 921,600, falling into the category of HD.
Billing = Video pricing × video minutes/1,000 × the number of recording sessions = $5.99 × 1,000/1,000 × 1 = $5.99
Scenario: Five users join the channel at the same time and have a video call for 1,000 minutes. One cloud recording session joins the channel and records the audio and video streams of the five users. The video resolution of each user is 640 × 360.
Cost: The recording service generates charges for the video minutes. The aggregate video resolution is 5 × (640 × 360) = 1,152,000, falling into the category of HD+.
Billing = Video pricing × video minutes/1,000 × the number of recording sessions= $22.49 × 1,000/1,000 × 1= $22.49
At the end of each month, Agora adds up the usage duration (in seconds) of audio, HD video, and HD+ video, and divides them by 60 to get the respective service minutes (rounded up to the next integer). For example, if the duration of audio service of the month is 59 seconds, then the audio service minutes is calculated as 1 minute; if the duration of video service is 61 seconds, then the video service minutes is calculated as 2 minutes. The error of service minutes for each month is within 1 minute.
When the user being recorded enables dual-stream mode, the recording service can receive only one stream at a time:
When calculating the aggregate resolution, Agora counts the resolution of 225,280 (640 × 352) as 640 × 360.
Your recording fee has nothing to do with the recording mode you choose. Regardless of whether you use the individual mode or composite mode, your recording fee relates only to the number of the streams recorded, the recording time, and the aggregate recording resolutions. The number of the streams recorded does not affect the recording duration, but affects the aggregate recording resolution.
Starting in January 2021, Agora further divided HD+ video into Full HD, 2K, and 2K+ video and set a more fine-grained pricing.
If you still use the previous pricing set for HD and HD+ video, see the following video categorization and unit price:
The pricing for audio and video is as follows:
Service type | Category | Pricing ($US/1,000 minutes) |
---|---|---|
Recording audio | N/A | 1.49 |
Recording video | High-Definition (HD) | 5.99 |
High-Definition Plus (HD+) | 22.49 |
Agora adds up the resolution of all the video streams recorded at the same time to get the aggregate resolution, which categorizes video as follows:
Video category | Video aggregate resolution |
---|---|
High-Definition (HD) | Video aggregate resolution ≤ 921,600 (1280 × 720) |
High-Definition Plus (HD+) | Video aggregate resolution > 921,600 (1280 × 720) |