What you pay for

Every line that can appear on an Aurix Cloud invoice, what is included, what is never billed, how hours are counted and where surprise costs come from — read this before you set a spending limit.

Aurix Cloud bills capacity, not players. There is no per-CCU, per-user or per-minute charge for the voice itself. The invoice is made of a small, closed list of line items — this page goes through each of them, with the exact rate the metering code uses, what plan includes it, and what you can do if it grows faster than you expected.

Note. All prices on this page are taken from the live catalog (GET /v1/catalog) and the billing constants in the control plane. If this page and the catalog ever disagree, the catalog wins; please tell us.

The invoice at a glance#

Everything else — SDKs, positional audio, server-side mixing, noise suppression, moderation, webhooks, the console, API calls, team members, projects, regions — carries no charge on any plan.

1. Plan subscription#

Launch offer. Until 31 Jan 2027 every Free project allows 200 concurrent participants instead of 50. Projects created while the offer runs keep 200 for 90 days after it ends. You get an e-mail and a console notice 14 and 3 days before your project drops back; when it does, nothing connected is cut — the ceiling only applies to new joins, exactly like the spending ladder. | Indie | $19 / month per project | up to 300 concurrent participants, 2 regions; recording and speech-to-text available, billed by use | shared pool | | Cloud | $0 base — you pay for nodes | dedicated nodes in our regions; recording and speech-to-text available, billed by use | your own nodes, run by us | | Your infrastructure | $0 base — $39 per node-month | your machines, our control plane; recording and speech-to-text included, traffic never billed | your own machines |

The subscription is the only fixed line. It is charged on the first of the month for the month ahead. Changing plan mid-month pro-rates the difference; downgrading to Free takes effect when the month ends.

The shared-pool cap is a concurrency cap, not a quota. On Free and Indie the cell enforces max_concurrent_sessions = 50 or 300. The 51st (or 301st) concurrent connection is refused with QUOTA_EXCEEDED until someone leaves. There is no monthly participant-minute quota — a Free project may run 50 participants 24 × 7 all month for $0.

2. Node-hours (Cloud plan)#

A node is a dedicated Aurix media server we run for you in a region of your choice. It is billed from the minute it is running until the minute it is stopped, as a fraction of an hour at the hourly rate of its size — not rounded up to whole hours.

"Rated capacity" is the participant count the node is sized for with plain forwarding (SFU). Server-side mixing and noise suppression on many uplinks cost CPU; see Large servers & scale for how to size them.

What counts as running. Provisioning time (the 60–120 s while the machine boots and the agent installs) is not billed; the node becomes running when it reports healthy. stopping and stopped are not billed. A node that fails its health check is still billed until it is stopped or replaced — autoscaling and the spending limit are there to stop it for you.

Autoscaling adds and removes nodes within the min/max you set per region. Scale-down waits until a node is empty, so a node can linger for a few minutes at $0.05–0.30 / h after the peak is over. The forecast on the Overview page already accounts for the nodes that are running right now.

3. Node management (Your infrastructure)#

When you run Aurix on your own machines through the control plane ("BYOC"), the only charge is $39 per node per month, accrued hourly (3900 ¢ / 730 h ≈ 5.34 ¢ per hour) for the hours the node is registered and running. Your own hosting, bandwidth and TURN are between you and your provider — nothing of it is metered by us, and recording storage and speech-to-text are included because they run on your machine.

4. Traffic over allowance#

Each Cloud node includes 10 TB of outbound traffic per node-month, pro-rated per hour (10,000 GB / 730 h ≈ 13.7 GB per node-hour). Traffic above the allowance is $0.01 per GB. Allowance is computed across all nodes of the project in the month, so a node that ran for 100 hours brings 1.37 TB of allowance with it.

How much voice uses: one Opus uplink at 32 kbps with DTX is roughly 10–14 MB per hour. A 100-player proximity server where ~20 people talk at a time forwards each voice to everyone in range; in practice 1 participant-hour ≈ 20–60 MB depending on how talkative the channel is and how wide the positional range is. Server-side mixing (one mixed downlink per listener) is the cheapest for traffic; per-participant tracks for browsers are the most expensive.

Shared plans (Free, Indie) never pay for traffic — the shared pool absorbs it, and the concurrency cap is the only limit. Your infrastructure never pays either: the bytes leave your own machine.

Each Cloud node also includes 200 GB of TURN relay per node-month. Players behind symmetric NAT or strict firewalls cannot reach the node over UDP and are relayed; relayed audio crosses our uplink twice, so bytes beyond the allowance are $0.04 / GB on top of traffic. The node's TURN server attributes relayed bytes to your project (turn_gb in usage); shared plans and Your infrastructure never pay for it.

6. Recording storage#

Recordings are stored as Opus files on the cell. Storage is billed at $0.02 per GB-month, accrued as GB-hours (0.0027397 ¢ per GB-hour). A recorded channel accrues about 57.6 MB per hour of recorded audio (128 kbps mixed stream), so an hour of recording kept for a month costs about $0.001.

Storage is billed on Indie and Cloud, where the files sit on our disks; it is included on Your infrastructure (your disk). On Free recording is not available. Storage is billed as long as the file exists — set a retention period on the channel or delete through the API; a forgotten "record everything" flag on a popular channel is the most common unexpected line on an invoice.

7. Speech-to-text#

Transcription (live captions, moderation transcripts) is billed per minute of audio actually sent to the recogniser: $0.006 per minute ($0.36 per hour). Silence (DTX) is not counted. It is billed on Indie and Cloud (the recogniser runs on our CPU), included on Your infrastructure (your CPU), not available on Free.

Example: a 50-participant channel with transcription: true where on average 3 people talk at once for 8 hours a day is 3 × 8 × 60 = 1,440 minutes a day ≈ $8.64 / day ≈ $260 / month on Indie. Enable transcription per channel, not per project.

8. Participant-minutes — reported, not billed#

The Usage page shows participant-minutes per hour because it is the number everybody else bills by. On Aurix it is informational only: the cost column for this metric is always $0. Use it to compare your own bill with a per-CCU quote.

Things that are never billed#

• API calls, tokens minted, channels created, webhooks delivered
• Team members, projects, SDK keys, regions enabled
• Server-side mixing, noise suppression, positional audio, ducking, audiences — all channel features
• Push-to-talk, text chat in channels, presence
• Inbound traffic (uplinks from players to the node)
• Idle capacity on the shared pool
• Provisioning time of a node before it reports running

How metering works#

The control plane pulls counters from each cell every 5 minutes and writes one row per metric per hour. The current hour is rewritten on every pass, so the Usage page and the forecast are at most 5 minutes behind. Node-hours are measured from the node lifecycle, not from the cell. Sub-cent amounts are kept to four decimals during the month and rounded once, on the invoice.

The forecast shown next to the spending limit is spent so far + rate of the last hour × hours remaining in the month. It is deliberately pessimistic after a peak and recovers within an hour.

The spending limit#

Every paid project has a limit you set. When the forecast (not the amount spent) crosses it, the degradation ladder acts in steps — 100 %: bitrate to 16 kbps; 105 %: server mixing and noise suppression off; 110 %: new channels in the home region only; 120 %: new connections refused. Each step can be switched off; if all are off, the limit is just a notification. Free has no limit because nothing is billed.

Example invoices#

Illustrative, based on the rates above; your traffic mix will differ.

Indie title, 200 players at peak, evenings#

Indie plan, shared pool. 200 concurrent fits under 300. Traffic not billed. No recording or transcription switched on. $19.00 / month, regardless of hours or minutes.

Launch month, 1,500 concurrent at peak, one region#

Cloud plan. One M node (2,000 rated) running 24 × 7: 730 h × $0.15 = $109.50. Autoscaling adds a second M node for 6 h on launch night: 6 × $0.15 = $0.90. Traffic: 1,500 × ~6 h / day × 30 × 40 MB ≈ 10.8 TB against 10.1 TB allowance → 700 GB × $0.01 = $7.00. TURN: 8 % relayed ≈ 860 GB against 200 GB → 660 × $0.04 = $26.40. ≈ $143.80. A per-CCU vendor at a list price of a few cents per CCU-hour would bill the same month in the thousands.

Large server, 4,000 concurrent, two regions, recording on#

Cloud plan. One L node per region: 2 × 730 × $0.30 = $438.00. Traffic allowance 20 TB; estimated 24 TB → 4,000 GB × $0.01 = $40.00. TURN 10 % ≈ 2.4 TB against 400 GB → 2,000 × $0.04 = $80.00. Recording of a 24 × 7 command channel ≈ 42 GB stored by month end, growing — about $0.50 the first month at $0.02 / GB-month, $0.84 every month after for what is kept. ≈ $558.50.

Studio on its own machines, 6 nodes#

Your infrastructure. 6 × $39 = $234.00 per month, hosting paid to your provider. Recording, speech-to-text and traffic are not metered — they run on your machines.

Where surprise costs come from — checklist#

1. A node left running after the event. Set autoscale min to 0 outside peak hours, or stop nodes from the console. The forecast will show it within 5 minutes.
2. TURN share higher than expected (mobile, universities, corporate networks). Watch the TURN column; on Cloud nodes the first 200 GB per node-month are free.
3. recording_enabled on a busy channel with no retention. On Indie and Cloud storage is cheap per GB but never stops accruing until files expire or are deleted.
4. transcription: true on a project-wide default instead of a single channel, on Indie and Cloud where it is billed.
5. Per-participant tracks for browsers on large positional channels multiply downlink traffic; prefer server mixing for listeners.
6. Scale-down lag: a node waits for its last participant to leave.
7. Two regions when one would do: each region's node has its own hours.

None of these can exceed your spending limit if the ladder's refuse step is enabled — that is the hard floor.

Payment, invoices, taxes#

One invoice per organisation on the first of the month, covering last month's usage and this month's subscriptions, charged to the card on file via Paddle (merchant of record: VAT/sales tax, receipts and refunds are handled by Paddle and shown in the console under Billing). A failed charge suspends new connections after a grace period and resumes them when the card is updated. Wire transfer is available from $500 / month — write to [email protected].