KEEPING FAMILIES CONNECTED

Pricing calculator

Live recompute. Cloudflare RealtimeKit + R2 + D1 + Workers + Workers AI (Whisper, m2m100) + Plivo PSTN, with vendor comparisons.

Inputs

Main facility — average daily countpeople held in main housing

ITR — average daily countpeople in Intake, Transfer, and Release — the designated unit where people are processed in, moved between facilities, or released; this is the population that makes calls to landline phone numbers

Video calls

Minutes per call

Video calls per person / week

% needing translationruns Whisper + m2m100

Audio calls (in-app, WebRTC)

Audio calls per person / dayin-app audio between an incarcerated person and a loved one — no PSTN, no per-minute charge to the family

Minutes per call3 × 15 = 45 min/person/day, in line with the Worth Rises May 2026 average of 44.8 min/day for prisons with free communication (see Sources)

Phone network calls (booking-notify, PSTN)

Phone network calls per person / dayITR is short-stay, so per-day instead of per-week

Minutes per call

Retention

Recording retentionyears stored before deletion

Include in costs

All investigative & storage services Transcription Translation Call export (recordings) Call storage

Assumptions (advanced)

Video call recording size (MB / min)RTK default: ~12 MB/min composite mp4 + ~1 MB/min audio m4a export = ~13 MB/min

Audio call bitrate (kbps)Opus voice-quality default; the derived MB/min figure updates below as you change this

Phone network call recording size (MB / min)Plivo MP3 — codebase notes 4–5 MB for a 15-minute call

Translation tokens / mininput + output, m2m100

RTK participants / call

Show Securus comparison

Estimated cost — Keeping Families Connected build

Note: Cloudflare RealtimeKit is currently in beta and is available at no cost during this period. This means that RTK Participants and RTK Export are currently free of charge. Pricing below is based on pricing provided by Cloudflare for when RealtimeKit is no longer in beta.

Monthly volume

Video calls—

Video call minutes—

Audio calls (in-app)—

Audio-call minutes—

Phone network calls—

Phone network call minutes—

R2 storage (steady state)—

Cost breakdown

Line item		Per month	Per year

Per video call

—

Per audio call

—

Per phone network call

—

Per person / yr

—

Total per year

—

Status quo

What our community would pay under our existing Securus contract

Under our existing Securus agreement (rates from the account representative's email dated 2025-03-05: 12¢/min video, 7¢/min audio; first 30 video-min per person per month comped), per-minute charges fall on the people making and receiving the calls. These dollars come out of the pockets of vulnerable members of our community.

Below: what the same amount of video calls, audio calls, and phone network calls would cost our community under the status quo, and what our community saves by replacing it.

Also include regular audio calls — Ameelio's free service replaces these. Toggle on to see the full community cost shift from both projects combined.

Average minutes per person per day:

Note: this does not include costs associated with tablet access.

Community-paid line item		Per month	Per year

Per video call (community pays)

—

at $0.12/min

Per phone network call (community pays)

—

at $0.07/min

Annual cost shifted off our community by replacing Securus

—

money our community keeps in their household budgets instead

Vendor comparison

Facility-side cost only. Click any row to see that vendor's line-item breakdown.

Vendor	Per video call	Per audio call	Per phone network call	Per month	Per year	% inv. & storage	vs KFC / yr

Vendor-specific notes (confirmed where marked):
• Twilio — $0.004/participant/min for participant recordings covers both audio and video tracks (confirmed). No built-in video translation product (confirmed) — assumed external m2m100 at the same rate as OURS. Voice recording and recording-storage prices are tiered monthly volumes: recording starts at $0.0040/min and drops to $0.0007/min above 100M min/mo; storage starts free for the first 10K rec-min, then $0.00050/min, declining to $0.00004/min above 1B min/mo. Browser/app VoIP (in-app audio) bills at $0.0040/participant-min under Programmable Voice.
• Amazon Chime SDK + Voice Connector + Amazon Transcribe + S3 — Audio-only Chime attendees bill at $0.0017/min, half the HD video rate. Amazon Transcribe Standard Streaming is a flat $0.075/audio-min (chosen over Batch so transcripts arrive live rather than after the call). AWS notes that "for a two-channel conversation, you only pay for the total audio duration and won't be charged separately for each channel," which is how we bill phone network calls (stereo PSTN). S3 Standard is tiered by total GB stored: $0.023 for the first 50 TB, $0.022 for the next 450 TB, $0.021 above 500 TB. AWS doesn't offer a directly comparable video-translation product, so translation is assumed external (m2m100, same as our build).
• Vonage Video API + Voice — In-app audio bills at $0.00462/participant-min under the Voice API WebRTC product. Vonage doesn't archive recordings long-term, so the comparison adds an external R2 storage line at our own rate to keep retention apples-to-apples. Audio and PSTN recording are both free (mono/stereo); transcription on both is assumed to use the same $0.0451/min rate as their post-call video transcription product.
• Zoom Video SDK + Zoom Phone — Sessions are billed per participant-min (confirmed): 5 users × 10 min = 50 session-min. Storage $0.25/GB is monthly (confirmed). Zoom Phone outbound at $0.0274/min (confirmed). Zoom's developer pricing page does not publish a separate audio-only Video SDK rate; in-app audio calls bill at the same $0.0035/participant-min session rate as video. Cloud Recording + Transcript rates also assumed to apply to PSTN audio at the same per-minute rates as video.
• Worth Rises figure — The 44.8 min/person/day audio-call default reflects the average reported in Critical Connections: The Power of Free Communication in Prisons and Jails (May 2026) for facilities offering free communication, modeled here as 3 calls × 15 min/day.
• All vendors — storage shown at steady state after the retention window fills. Year 1 ramps from 0 to that figure.

Sources

Information collected from the below sources on 5-29-2026 for illustrative purposes. Publicly posted pricing may not reflect non-profit, government, civic tech, volume, or other available discounts.

Keeping Families Connected stack — Cloudflare + Plivo

Cloudflare RealtimeKit pricing — participants $0.002/min A/V, $0.0005/min audio-only; recording export $0.010/min RTMP/HLS A/V, $0.003/min RTMP/HLS audio-only, $0.0005/min raw RTP into R2
Cloudflare R2 pricing — $0.015/GB-mo, no egress fees
Workers AI — Whisper Large V3 Turbo — transcription, $0.00051/audio-min
Workers AI — m2m100 1.2B — translation, $0.34 / 1M tokens
Cloudflare D1 pricing — database, included in the Workers + D1 platform line
Cloudflare Workers pricing — compute, included in the Workers + D1 platform line
Plivo PSTN pricing — phone network booking-notify calls, $0.0115/min outbound (US local)

Amazon Chime SDK + Voice Connector + Transcribe + S3

Amazon Chime SDK pricing — HD attendee $0.0034/min, audio-only attendee $0.0017/min, HD session capacity $0.0001/min, 720p composited recording $0.010/min, Voice Connector outbound $0.0048/min, PSTN recording $0.0028/min
Amazon Transcribe pricing — Standard Streaming Transcription, flat $0.075/audio-min; two-channel conversations billed at total audio duration (not per channel)
Amazon S3 Standard pricing — tiered: $0.023/GB (first 50 TB), $0.022/GB (next 450 TB), $0.021/GB (over 500 TB)

Vonage Video API + Voice API

Vonage Video API pricing — participants $0.0041/min, HD composed archive $0.0363/min, post-call transcription $0.0451/archive-min
Vonage Voice API pricing — WebRTC in-app audio $0.00462/participant-min, PSTN outbound $0.00798/min, recording free

Twilio Video + Voice

Twilio Video API pricing — Video Group Room $0.004/participant-min, participant recordings $0.004/participant-min (covers both A/V tracks), composition $0.010/min, room transcription $0.027/room-min, media storage $0.00167/GB/day after 10 GB free
Twilio Voice API pricing — browser/app VoIP $0.0040/participant-min, local outbound $0.014/min, batch transcription $0.024/min; tiered recording $0.0040 → $0.0007/min; tiered recording-storage free → $0.00004/min

Zoom Video SDK + Zoom Phone

Zoom developer pricing — Video SDK sessions $0.0035/participant-min, Cloud Recording $0.010/min, Cloud Recording Storage $0.25/GB-mo, Cloud Recording Transcript $0.0075/min, Live Translation $0.010/min, Zoom Phone outbound $0.0274/min. No separate audio-only Video SDK rate is published; audio-only is billed at the session rate above.

Audio-call volume default

Worth Rises — Critical Connections: The Power of Free Communication in Prisons and Jails (May 2026) — 44.8 min/person/day average audio-call consumption in facilities offering free communication; modeled here as 3 calls × 15 min/day