The ability to create new papers and make calls. The more you commit to monthly, the cheaper each will be. Only paid accounts will have the ability to create papers and create video calls. The credits to papers and video minutes available depends on your subscription. There is a free plan which allows you to join paper and calls created by others.
No. The free/student account is for them as they can always have basic access to your papers unless they want access to the paid features themselves. Anyone on a free account can still join a BitPaper that you create or a call that you start. There are no credits on how many students join a Bitpaper, but each additional user you add to a call will use up your video minutes proportionally.
No. You can cancel your plan at any time or just choose the free/student. This will keep all your papers and they will continue to be accessible and work as they always did, you just cannot create new papers or calls anymore.
Any accrued papers and call hours will still be accessible, you just will not be allocated further papers or calls or charged monthly.
When you log in you will be invited to Subscribe to a plan that suits your needs and budget. Then you will be asked to provide your name and address for card billing purposes, and then add a credit/debit card to complete your payment.
All payments will be handled by Stripe (one of the largest online payment providers in the world). We will not handle or store your card details, they are inputted securely through encryption into Stripe. Once you have paid, your calendar monthly billing cycle will begin and you will be charged the same amount monthly on the same day of the month as you subscribed to the plan every month. In the My Accounts section, you will be able to upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time, cancel your subscription at any time, or change your card if you have payment problems.
Yes. Simply hit the Cancel Plan button in My Accounts and at the end of the month your account will revert back to a free account. You will not lose access to your saved papers.
Yes. Your unused minutes and papers on your previous plan will be added to your new plan.
Your card will be charged when you select a new plan.
Your unused papers and call hours will roll over to the next month.
You can also top up with a smaller package and upgrade or downgrade at any time during the month
without a penalty if you get behind or ahead on usage due to seasonality.
In your ‘My Account’ section, you will be able to view your current plan including billing cycle dates and remaining credit of Papers and video minutes for the month. As you create new papers, or duplicate existing ones, you will reduce your remaining count by one. Once you hit your credit, you will either need to wait to the end of your billing cycle to create more, or upgrade your plan to increase the credits to a new higher level. Papers you have created in past months are still fully available to use and interact with even if your credit is reached. You pay to create new papers each month, not to access your old ones.
Similar to the paper credits. You have a calendar monthly credit and you will use it up as you have audio/video calls.
However, each participant counts as 1 video user. So if you have 1 other person on a call for an hour, it will count as 2 hours of total video time (yours plus theirs). If you have three people on a call for an hour it will count as three hours of video time and so on.
This is how pricing is set by our audio/video providers and so we are pricing usage in the same way they do to align our costs with their pricing. WebRTC works out at around $0.66 an hour on their basic pricing models, but we have negotiated significant discounts for our users. For reference, our Audio/Video provider is Vonage, you can see their pricing here.
If each call had two students in it, you would use up your quota faster because each call is now 3 users. I.e. 10 classes x 3 users x 0.5 hours = 15 hours of total call time.
Screen sharing is equivalent to adding an extra party into the call. So if you had a 10 dollar package, and had a one hour screen share with a single student it would be 2 + 1 users x 1 hour = 3 hours of total video time. For this reason we highly recommend you turn screen sharing on only when you need it, and turn it off again when you do not as it adds an additional user cost to your billing. If you turn it on for a few minutes you will barely feel the difference in pricing, if you turn it on and leave it on as it’s the equivalent of an extra student in the class.
Again, this is how WebRTC providers charge us and how the pricing of this technology works.