Tracking and Calculating Usage

How usage is calculated and how to create billing reports

📘

Usage by workspace

Usage is scoped to individual workspaces. To get usage by workspace, you can call the list endpoint for the related model and sum the usage

How to get a single bot's usage

A single bot's usage is considered the time the bot is "active" and is calculated from when the bot triggers the joining_call event until a terminal event (e.g. done or fatal), where:

  • The joining_call event occurs when the bot first loads the meeting URL.
  • The done/fatal events are used when the bot leaves the call/can't record (e.g. meeting ID doesn't exist)
  • The "active" time includes time spent in waiting_room and/or in_call_no_recording states.
📘

Bot usage per workspace

You can use the Get Usage endpoint to retrieve the number of bot hours used within a specific time period for a given workspace.

How to track bot usage for your own customers

You may want to track usage for an individual user or specific organization. For these cases, you can track bot usage with custom metadata

Example

Imagine you want to view all usage from the customer with ID 1234 in October. You can:

  1. Create a bot that includes the customer_id in the metadata field.
  2. Call the List Bots endpoint and filter by the customer_id and date range. This will return a paginated list of bots.
  3. Calculate the usage for each bot and sum up bot usage for all bots returned from the above query.
📘

You can use this sample app to see how to calculate bot usage over a time range and/or for a specific customer.

Meeting bot usage rates

Meeting bot usage rates start at $0.70 per hour of usage on our pay-as-you-go plan, with discounts available at higher tiers, and are rounded to the nearest second. For example, if you have a bot that is running for 5 min and 10 seconds, your bot usage will be 5 minutes and 10 seconds.

Bots operate on dedicated machines and usage is based on the machine's runtime (not just the time the bot is recording). This means that:

  • There is no additional charge for scheduling bots in advance. Since the machine isn't running until the bot becomes active, you only incur charges once the bot starts.
  • There is no additional costs to use specific features - Note that some bot features are more CPU intensive so you can opt to use a larger bot instance with more CPU via bot variants
  • There is no additional charges for individual API requests

Bot variants

Some features may require more compute (e.g. output media, real-time H264 video per participant) and you can choose to use more powerful machines (called variants) for smoother bot and recording experiences. Due to the inherent cost of running larger machines, the prices for some variants are higher:

VariantPay-as-you-go planMonthly plans
(default)$0.70/hourstandard bot usage rate
web_4_core$0.80/hourstandard bot usage rate + $0.10/hour
web_gpu$1.70/hourstandard bot usage rate + $1.00/hour

You can set a custom variant by adding the following to your Create Bot config:

{
  ...
  "variant": {
    "zoom": "web_4_core",
    "google_meet": "web_4_core",
    "microsoft_teams": "web_4_core"
  }
}

Transcription Usage

How to get a single recording's transcription usage

There are different ways to get a recording's transcription usage for a given recording depending on what transcription provider you're using

Calculating usage for Recall.ai Transcription

For a given recording, calculate the difference between the started_at and completed_at timestamps.

Calculating usage for Third-party Transcription Providers

For a given recording, check the transcription provider's data directly by querying the recording.transcript.data.provider_data_download_url field. This contains the raw data received from the transcription provider and indicates the exact audio duration that was transcribed.

Meeting Caption Transcription

There is no cost associated with meeting caption transcription.

Transcription usage rates

The transcription usage rates vary by provider, and you can supply your own API key to use the custom rates you have negotiated directly.

Recall.ai transcription rates start at $0.15 per hour on our pay-as-you-go plan, with discounts available at higher tiers, and are rounded to the nearest second.