What are the different pricing models and terminology?

Active Devices vs Metered Billing

Depending on which Appetize plan you choose (Starter, Premium, or Enterprise) you can be charged two ways  - Concurrent Sessions and/or Metered Minutes. We provide these pricing models as our customers needs and use cases vary. There is no "one size fits all."

So what makes them different and what do they mean?

Metered Billing

Metered Billing means that you're being charged on a variable basis each billing period by the amount of the service you consume, which is measured in streaming minutes.  Each plan (Trial, Starter, Premium, and Enterprise) comes with a starter pack of minutes to be used before you're charged for any "overage" minutes.

Active Devices

Am Active Device means someone in your organization is actively consuming a device via Appetize. For an active device to become available, the user will need to exit the browser tab that has the active device running, refresh the page, programmatically end the session via JavaScript, or have the session timeout due to the Inactivity Timeout. Your usage is unmetered but your users would get queued if too many try to use the service at the same time.

Active Devices pricing is only available with our Enterprise Plan (sold in packs of 8 with a minimum purchase of 16 active devices), and is the required pricing model for our Enterprise Private Cloud offering where clients are given a dedicated instance of Appetize tailored to their specific geographic and other requirements.

NOTE: We also have some Enterprise Plan customers who prefer per-minute billing with large volumes of active devices due to their usage requirements (eg. large numbers of users, but infrequent use). At the Enterprise level, our team will make recommendations based on understanding your use case and the expected usage pattern. 

For a more detailed breakdown of each of our plans, please see our pricing page.