Why per-listener pricing is broken
Per-listener pricing is a holdover. It made sense when reaching one more person meant one more phone line, one more headset, or one more interpreter in the booth. Every additional listener carried a real, physical cost — so charging per head matched the economics.
Software broke that link. When a live translation is streamed over the internet, the difference between 50 listeners and 5,000 is negligible. Yet a lot of tools still bill as if each new listener were a new headset — which means the moment your event succeeds, your bill balloons.
The tools that charge per listener are quietly taxing you for reaching more people. That's exactly backwards.
What you're actually paying for
The real cost of live translation is the work of translating — turning speech into text, text into other languages, and language into natural audio. That cost scales with two things:
- Time spoken. More minutes of speech means more processing.
- Languages produced. Each target language is its own translation stream.
Notice what's missing: the number of listeners. Once a language stream exists, sending it to one person or one million costs essentially the same. So that's how we price it — per language, per hour of speech, with listeners always unlimited.
Why it matters for events
Events are inherently one-to-many. A sermon, a keynote, a safety briefing — the whole point is to reach as many people as possible. A pricing model that penalizes reach is fundamentally misaligned with what events are for. Flat, per-language pricing lets you grow your audience without watching a meter.
It's a small idea with a big consequence: never think twice about adding one more listener.