Billing Assumptions

This page provides more detail on how we calculate your bill - in particular how we aggregate activity and handle rounding boundaries.

We collate and store usage and billing related activity every week - and assume a week runs from Monday through Sunday per ISO 8601. This provides more fine grained activity reporting than collating only monthly. When logged in, you can review this collated data weekly data here .
Our billing cycle, however, follows the calender month, so some months your bill will cover four weeks of activity and some months it will cover five.
For billing purposes, seconds are rounded to the nearest minute and bytes are rounded to nearest Mb - (midway values round up).
All time based calculations (such as those which which rely on boundaries between days, weeks and months) work from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) / Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Time boundaries are not localised to the customer or adjusted for daylight savings.
We use the payment gateway provided by Stripe Inc. and some of their terms and conditions will apply to your use of our service.
All pricing is quoted in US Dollars and the actual charge against your account will be subject to exchange rates at the time of payment as calculated by Stripe Inc.
Due to 'per transaction' processing charges, very small balances might be held over to a following month rather than actually charged.
In the event of high account activity, we reserve the right to take interim payments against your balance during the month so that we are not carrying substantial risk due to any unforeseen inability to collect payment at the end of the month.

Instances are billed at two seperate rates, one for when they are running and another (much lower) for when they are stopped.
Each week, we sum the number of seconds each size of instance has been running or stopped. The totals are then rounded to the nearest minute and reported to stripe. Each month, stripe calculates your bill based on the total number of minutes reported during the month.
An instance started and stopped several times in the billing period has a separate invoice line for time running and time stopped. Because we round minutes, the total time may not add up to exactly the billing period.
The actual calculation converts the published price per hour into a price per minute, accurate to 12 decimal places; this figure is multiplied by the total number of billed minutes for the period. This conversion can result in a very small (minuscule would be more accurate) difference between the published 'per hour' price and actual 'per minute' price charged.

The processing of recordings is charged based on the time it takes the virtual computer to startup, perform the task and shut down.
If there is no recording for a meeting, there is no processing charge. If there is a recording, the minimum billable time for processing each recording is three minutes.
Each week, the sum of processor 'runtime seconds' is rounded to the nearest minute and reported to stripe. Each month, stripe calculates your bill based on the total number of minutes reported during the month.

The pricing of On Demand Meetings uses a proprietary algorithm which works out a price based on an estimate of the computing resources we will need to run the meeting. You can check the actual cost of different meeting parameters using the meeting price calculator.
The length of a meeting is measured from the time that we detect it is available to participants to when BigBlueButton announces that the meeting has ended, rounded to the nearest minute.
There is a minimum cost of $0.30 per meeting hour and an absolute minimum charge of $0.10 for any meeting started, however short. These limits can be seen in action if you experiment with the meeting price calculator.
Breakout rooms are charged at 15% of the rate shown by the meeting calculator for the parent meeting, with a minimum of £0.02 for any breakout room started.

At regular intervals through each week, we snapshot how much storage space is being used by your account.
Each week we calculate the average storage used over the last week. This is rounded to the nearest Mb and reported to stripe. The reason for this approach is to 'smooth out' any temporary but abnormally high or low usage during any given week so the actual bill more fairly reflects usage.
Your monthly bill is based on the maximum weekly reported usage during the month.
The actual charge is calculated from the published price per GB converted into a price per MB, accurate to 12 decimal places. This conversion can result in a very small (minuscule would be more accurate) difference between the published 'per GB/month' price and actual 'per MB/month' billed price.