Live video usage and your spend cap

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. With overage off, the host sees a warning in the room at 90% of your included hours. With overage on, the included hours are not a wall, so that warning only appears once you are past them and have used 80% of your spend cap. You are also emailed 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.

You can pause any one of them. Switch it off under What can go past your plan in Change limit, and it stops at what your plan includes while the others keep going. With live video paused, rooms stop at your included hours as if extra usage were off, and the Events page tells you to turn live video back on under Change limit. See Usage and overage pricing.