Tiers & ceilings
The ceiling on what a participant-minute can cost depends on two things: the participant’s role and their tier.
| Role | Who | Ceiling column |
|---|---|---|
host |
Publishes — owners, cohosts, guests on stage | Interactive |
audience |
Watches at interactive latency, can be brought on stage | Interactive |
broadcast_audience |
Only watches | Broadcast |
Tiers by aggregate pixels
Section titled “Tiers by aggregate pixels”A participant’s tier is set by the sum of the pixels of every video stream they received at the same time — the same boundaries the incumbents bill on, so the ceiling compares like with like.
| Tier | tier value |
Aggregate pixels received | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio | audio |
0 (audio only) | Voice room |
| HD | hd |
≤ 1280 × 720 = 921,600 | One 720p tile, or four 640×360 tiles |
| Full HD | full_hd |
≤ 1920 × 1080 = 2,073,600 | One 1080p tile, or two 720p tiles |
| 2K | 2k |
≤ 2560 × 1440 = 3,686,400 | A 1440p stream, or a grid of nine 640×360 plus a 720p |
| 2K+ | 2k_plus |
> 3,686,400 | 4K, or many large tiles at once |
xychart-beta
title "Ceiling per 1,000 participant-minutes (USD)"
x-axis ["Audio", "HD", "Full HD", "2K", "2K+"]
y-axis "USD" 0 --> 40
bar [0.98, 3.98, 8.98, 15.98, 35.98]
line [0.58, 1.98, 4.58, 7.98, 17.98]
Bars: host and interactive audience. Line: broadcast audience.
Ceiling table
Section titled “Ceiling table”| Tier | Host / audience | Broadcast audience |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | $0.98 | $0.58 |
| HD | $3.98 | $1.98 |
| Full HD | $8.98 | $4.58 |
| 2K | $15.98 | $7.98 |
| 2K+ | $35.98 | $17.98 |
Per 1,000 participant-minutes. Each is Agora’s list price minus one cent. A charge is prorated
to the second: ceiling × seconds / 60,000.
Keeping tiers low
Section titled “Keeping tiers low”Because tiers count what a participant receives, subscribing to an appropriately sized quality
for each tile keeps viewers in lower tiers. The Swift SDK does this automatically when you report
your layout with updateLayout — a 16-person grid on a phone does not need 16 HD streams.