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Pricing calculator

Open Billing → Pricing Calculator (/billing/calculator) when you need to answer “what would this cost” before you send a single message or book a single video room. The page composes five estimator widgets, each a read-only preview — none of them charges your wallet, moves money, or pays anything out. You model a hypothetical configuration, read the projected cost, and discard it. This page is what it composes, in order:
  1. Pricing calculator (channel cost estimate) — estimated monthly messaging cost from your live rate card.
  2. RTC cost simulator — projected monthly bill for video/audio rooms at a bundled per-tier rate.
  3. AI & marketplace pricing estimates — three calculators: AIaaS usage, marketplace rev-share, and pay-per-resolution metering.
  4. Partner / reseller payout statement — the periodic statement a white-label or referral partner would be owed, itemized by sub-account.
  5. Volume savings — the effective per-unit price a hypothetical monthly volume earns under your volume-tier ladder.

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1. The five widgets

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Channel cost estimate (monthly messaging)

The top widget estimates a monthly messaging bill from three inputs:
  • Channels — SMS plus the channels whose rates are quoted via sales today (voice, RCS, email, Viber, WhatsApp). SMS is priced live; the rest render “Rate unavailable — contact sales” rather than inventing a number the invoice would disagree with. A channel never gets a fabricated price.
  • Monthly volume — a logarithmic slider from 100 to 1M units. Past 500K/month the widget stops quoting list rates and shows a volume-discount contact card instead, because per-unit list pricing stops being a meaningful estimate at that scale.
  • Destination country — the rendered SMS rate comes from your live per-operator rate card for that country. The estimate takes the cheapest operator rate for the destination, and the price already includes your organization’s markup — the number you see is the number the wallet would be charged.
The result panel shows the estimated monthly total, a per-channel breakdown (rate × volume), and — only when a real rate resolved — a comparison against the public list price of another CPaaS, so the savings line always pairs two real quotes. A Share estimate button encodes the current configuration into a URL you can paste to a teammate; opening it lands them on exactly the same estimate.

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RTC cost simulator

The RTC simulator projects a monthly video bill against a single bundled rate per resolution tier — audio-only, SD (480p), HD (720p), or Full HD (1080p) — with recording, captions, signaling, and one RTMP destination already included. It exists so the bill has no surprise line items: you model participants per room, minutes per room, and rooms per month, optionally add extra RTMP destinations, recording storage, or a dedicated SFU cluster, then Run forecast. The reply breaks the projected total into line items — participant-minutes, a blended per-minute rate, and any extras you added. That same math is available over POST /pricing/rtc-simulate, and the static tier card over GET /pricing/rtc-rate-card.

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AI & marketplace pricing estimates

Three read-only calculators for the AI-agent and marketplace surfaces, each posting the counters you type to its preview endpoint and returning an estimate — nothing is charged:
  • AIaaS usage — AI message count, voice minutes, and resolved outcomes to an estimated total per axis, with no platform or seat fee.
  • Agent & tool marketplace rev-share — for a published listing: invocations, a per-call price, and the platform fee percentage return the gross charge, the Orbit platform fee, and the builder’s net payout — including whether the builder is above or below the payout threshold (below threshold rolls over).
  • Pay-per-resolution metering — a count of confirmed AI resolutions at a per-resolution rate returns the metered count and the projected invoice total. Toggling billing off returns the count with a “no charge” badge, so you can model what a resolution pipeline would cost once metering goes live on your account.

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Partner / reseller payout statement

The reseller preview answers “what would we owe this partner for the period” — itemized by sub-account. You enter each sub-account’s revenue and carrier cost, the channel, a partner id, the negotiated revenue-share percentage, and the statement period. The preview returns a shaped statement:
  • Gross revenue, cost of goods, and net margin — the split always comes out of net margin (revenue minus carrier cost), never gross revenue.
  • Partner share and platform retained — and a loss period statements a zero partner share rather than a negative one.
  • A per-sub-account line table so a large account’s payout can be traced per line.
The statement only shapes what is owed — it computes no transfer, credits no wallet, and pays nothing out.

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Volume savings

The volume-savings widget mirrors the volume-tier ladder your account bills against. Pick a channel (SMS, WhatsApp, or voice minutes), type a hypothetical monthly volume, and the preview returns the effective per-unit price that volume earns, the projected spend versus the undiscounted rack rate, the projected savings, and the full discount ladder — so you can see which tier a volume commits you to before committing it.

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2. How to estimate

Work top-down, broadly as the page composes:
  1. Estimate per-channel messaging first. Select your channels, set a monthly volume, and pick the destination country. The SMS leg prices against your live per-operator rate card; unpriced legs show the sales-contact link instead of a made-up rate. Read the grand total plus the per-channel breakdown.
  2. Simulate RTC minutes. In the RTC simulator, convert your meeting pattern into the three base inputs — participants × minutes per room × rooms per month. The forecast returns participant-minutes and the blended rate, which is the number to compare provider-to-provider.
  3. Add AI usage if you run agents. The AIaaS and resolution calculators turn your expected agent traffic into a price per axis; the marketplace calculator prices what your published listings would pay out.
  4. Apply volume tiers last. Once you have a total volume, run it through the volume-savings widget to see the effective rate you’d actually pay at that scale — list-rate estimates and tiered rates can diverge meaningfully once you cross a tier boundary.
Currencies: the messaging widget renders in your account’s currency (resolved from your wallet balance; USD otherwise). The RTC totals, AI previews, marketplace preview, and reseller statement are USD-denominated — previews are USD-only on the server side. For how FX and account currencies behave when real money moves, see wallet currency conversion and how billing meters your usage.

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3. When to use which widget

The calculators split into three questions: Do not confuse this page with the what-if pricing simulator (Billing → What-if pricing simulator). They answer opposite questions. The what-if simulator replays traffic you already sent through a candidate rate card — the traffic is held fixed, only the rates change — so it back-tests a negotiated sheet against your last 1–90 days. The pricing calculator page models traffic you haven’t sent yet — a volume, tier, or configuration you’re planning. Rule of thumb: validating a rate change → what-if simulator; planning a new workload → pricing calculator.

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4. Where the numbers come from

Every widget here is wired to the same pricing rules the wallet actually bills under — a displayed estimate is never a fabricated number:
  • The SMS rate in the channel cost estimate comes from your live per-operator rate card (GET /pricing/mccmnc-rates), with the markup resolution — per-operator override, your organization’s markup, or the platform default — applied exactly the way the send path applies it. That precedence is documented in pricing and rate resolution.
  • The RTC simulator server-side computes against one shared rate card, so the dashboard and the API agree.
  • Volume savings reads the tier ladder configured on your account — the same ladder billing applies when it rates your usage.
Because the resolver is shared, the reconciliation loop is closed: an estimate you ran here can be traced to the same pricing rule a ledger debit carries attribution to.

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5. Role gating

The page follows the same gate as the other billing surfaces: owner, admin, and billing roles see the full calculators including account-derived data (currency, balance-derived formatting). Members outside those roles see a degraded view — for the messaging estimate specifically, the wallet balance read that resolves the display currency is skipped and the widget falls back to USD. The what-if simulator additionally gates on the same three roles because its reply carries your real spend; the calculator page’s previews carry only hypothetical counters you typed, so their previews don’t expose recorded usage.

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Worked example: plan a 250K-message SMS + video month

An operator planning a new customer-support workload walks the page top-down:
  1. Pick channels. In the channel cost estimate, select SMS, drag the volume slider to 250K, and set the destination to Germany. The widget reads your live Germany per-operator rates and returns the estimated monthly SMS cost — say it renders the cheapest operator rate with your markup already applied — plus a savings line versus the other CPaaS’s published list price. Copy the Share estimate URL into the planning ticket so finance sees the same inputs.
  2. Simulate the RTC minutes. The support team plans 100 rooms/month of 30 minutes with 5 participants in HD. Enter HD, 5 participants, 30 minutes, 100 rooms per month and Run forecast: 15,000 participant-minutes at the HD tier rate, with no surprise extras because recording and captions are bundled.
  3. Add the volume tier. Now that the workload is sized at 250K messages/month, open the volume-savings widget, pick SMS, type 250000, and read the effective per-unit price — if your ladder has a tier boundary below 250K, the volume preview prices the month lower than the list-rate estimate from step 1.
  4. Preview partner payouts. If this workload flows through a white-label partner, enter the three sub-accounts it serves — revenue and carrier cost per sub-account — set the partner’s revenue-share percentage and the statement period, and read the partner share out of net margin. The statement shapes the payout conversation; it pays nothing.
At the end of the walk you have a list-rate messaging estimate, a tier-adjusted effective rate, a per-minute RTC bill, and a shaped partner statement — all read-only, all priced on the same rules the wallet bills under, all discardable with a page refresh.