Live video usage and your spend cap
Live rooms and webinars are billed by usage. What is included, the price of extra hours, and how the spend cap keeps a long session from surprising you.
- billing
- live
- usage
Most of Drry is a flat monthly price. Live video is the part that is metered, because a room with forty people in it for two hours costs real money while it is happening. So it is metered, honestly, with a cap you control.
How the meter counts
Participant hours, for rooms: every person in the room counts, every hour. A one hour call with five people uses five.
Viewer hours, for webinars: every viewer counts, every hour. Forty people watching for thirty minutes uses twenty.
What is included
Free: no rooms hosted inside Drry, so no live video meter. Events where you paste your own Zoom or Meet link are not affected.
Creator: 20 participant hours a period, with rooms of up to 25 people. Roughly two and a half hours of calls with eight people, or about 48 minutes with 25.
Growth: 50 participant hours and 150 webinar viewer hours a period, with rooms of up to 100 people.
The room size counts everyone in the room, you included.
If you own more than one community, the hours are shared across all of them, and so is the spend cap. A session in any of your communities counts toward the same pool. See One plan for all your communities.
What extra usage costs
Participant hours: $0.75 per hour, on Creator and Growth.
Viewer hours: $0.15 per hour, on Growth only, because only Growth has webinars.
These rates are the same on every plan that has the meter. Email and storage have their own rates, listed in Usage and overage pricing.
Recording, chat and transcripts use no hours at all. Only people in the room count, and a webinar's presenters count as participants while the people watching count as viewers.
Past the allowance
Two possible answers, and you choose which. With overage off, usage stops at what your plan includes: a room will not open. With overage on, sessions carry on and are charged against a spend cap you set. The range depends on your plan: Free has no overage, so there is nothing to set and the ceiling is $0, you simply cannot go over. Creator can set a cap from $5 up to $100. Growth can set a cap from $5 up to $300. You are warned at 90% of your included hours, and by email when your extra usage reaches 80% of your cap. When a session is not allowed to continue, it gets a five minute wind-down before it ends.
What this covers
The same spend cap covers three things on the plans that have overage: live video (participant and viewer hours), emails past your included sends, and storage held past your plan's included amount. One cap, one number to watch across all three.
Common questions
Does an empty room cost anything?
No. Nobody in the room means no participant hours.
Do I count as a participant in my own room?
Yes. You are a person in the room and the underlying cost does not know you are the host.
Why is there a cap at all?
Because we pay the video bill as it happens and collect at the end of the month. The cap bounds that for both of us, and it is the reason there is no upfront commitment for live video.
Do my other communities share these hours?
Yes. If you own more than one community, they share one allowance of live hours and one spend cap. The statement lists each session under the community it was in.