Red5 Pro Pricing Explained

When it comes to surprises, there are good ones: birthday parties, visits from old friends, or a “just because” card. Then there are the bad ones: discovering that what you thought was blue cheese is, in fact, just moldy cheese, believing Facebook protects your data, Luke Skywalker’s paternity test, and last but not least, hidden fees.

Those pesky fines, arbitrary “convenience” fees, or fine print surcharges. There is nothing more aggravating then expecting to pay one amount only to receive a much higher bill.

So, in the interest of transparency, let us explain directly how our pricing works. No magnifying glass or lawyers necessary.

License Plans

In order to use the streaming capabilities of Red5 Pro, you will need either an Enterprise, Growth Pro, Startup Pro or Developer Pro server license. We have already outlined the differences between plans in a previous post, so let’s focus strictly on the pricing.

We offer annual or monthly pricing, with annual subscriptions providing a price break.

Growth Pro (Best Value)

$279 a month (charged once per year – $3,348) or $299 per month (charged once per month).

Startup Pro

$109 a month (charged once per year – $1,308) or $119 per month (charged once per month).

Developer Pro

$29.99 per month (no yearly option)

In order to upgrade your account, all you need to do is go to your account overview page and select the plan that you want. This will update the license key with the new license plan. As such you do not necessarily have to make any further changes.

Mobile SDK

In addition to a Server License, those wishing to build a native application for the best possible user experience will need the Mobile SDK: $349 a month (charged once per year – $4,188) or $419 per month (charged once per month).

That cost covers both iOS and Android platforms, along with the appropriate technical support included with your license.

Additional Costs

Hosting

Red5 Pro is a hosting agnostic solution which means you will need to host your application on a third party hosting provider such as AWS, Google, or Azure. Any data costs will be paid directly to your provider. This avoids any kind of surcharge that hosted solutions will often add to their platforms.

We do not charge by the minute, second, parsec or any other method of time measurement.

If you would like a better idea of what your data costs could be, contact us for an estimate. As we’ve done before, we can run those calculations for you

Instances

According to our FAQ, an instance is essentially a single copy of a running program. So for each server spun up to deal with increased traffic flow or higher resolution, that will count as another instance.

Any server that runs for 15 minutes or more will count as an additional instance for that month. You will only be charged for the highest number of instances running at the same time.

Your per instance charge will vary according to the license plan you are using.

Startup Pro

$119 with a monthly plan or $109 with the yearly plan (charged per month, per instance).

Growth Pro

$89 with the yearly plan or $99 with a monthly plan (charged per month, per instance).

For those planning to scale to a large number of users, we offer bulk discounts and pricing for large enterprise installations.

Saving Money

The most cost-effective plan is the Growth Pro especially for scaling your application to a larger user base.

Even if you are not concerned with scaling, there are still advantages to the Growth Pro which includes 3 instances. Even if you are only using one instance for production, you can use another instance to establish a testing server. That way when one of your developers has an unexpected “Oops” moment, your production server still remains undisturbed and functioning as expected.

Let Us Do the Work For You

We also offer custom support plans where we manage your cloud installation. No worries about maintaining servers and dealing with a spike in user traffic, our development team can handle all of that for you.

Interested?

If you still have questions or are ready to be surprised by our real-time latency, check out our site, shoot us an email to info@red5.net or, better yet, schedule a call.