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What actually counts as an “hour”

The BabelCast team
Apr 2026 · 3 min read

You should be able to predict your bill without a spreadsheet. That means being precise about the one unit that actually shows up on it: the source-hour.

Usage follows detected speech, with a floor

We meter each live source by the hour, and usage follows the speech we actually detect and translate. There's one wrinkle: a live session holds translation capacity open the whole time it runs, so it bills for at least half of its active time. In practice, a one-hour live session uses at least 30 minutes and never more than 60.

  • Counts: detected speech while translation is live, and at minimum half of the session's active time.
  • Doesn't count: setup and prewarm before the translator is ready. The clock starts when translation goes live.
  • Never counts: how many people are listening, or how many languages you run within your plan.

Why we measure it this way

The work of turning speech into text, text into other languages, and language back into natural audio runs from the moment a session goes live, even through quiet stretches, because that capacity stays reserved for you. The 50% floor keeps a live-but-quiet session fair without ever charging you a full hour of silence. And a room somebody forgot to close doesn't run up a bill: after 10 minutes of silence a visible countdown starts, at 15 the session ends itself, and every session has a hard 12-hour ceiling.

A good turnout should never raise your bill, and a forgotten session should never run one up.

Listeners stay free, every language you add within your plan is included, and the meter is tied to live translation time with a 50% floor. That's the whole meter.

Free listeners on every plan. Try it yourself.

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Listeners are never metered per person; very large audiences follow fair-use capacity limits. See Terms.

Questions this post answers

Usage follows the speech BabelCast detects while translation is live, with a floor of half the session's active time. A one-hour live session therefore bills at least 30 minutes and never more than 60. Setup and prewarm never count; the clock starts when translation goes live.

It ends itself. After 10 minutes of silence a visible countdown starts, and at 15 minutes the session closes on its own. Every session also has a hard 12-hour ceiling, so a room somebody forgot to close never runs up an open-ended bill.

Because a live session holds translation capacity open the whole time it runs, even through quiet stretches. The 50% floor keeps a live-but-quiet session fair without ever charging a full hour of silence: at least half the active time, never more than the full hour.

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