Daily.co Pricing 2026: Per-Minute Rates and Plans
Nov 11, 202615 min read
Daily gives you a free monthly allowance of minutes, then bills pay-as-you-go per participant-minute, with named plan tiers above that.
The per-minute rate is the smallest part of what you'll actually pay, because the real costs tend to surface in the glue work around it, like recording workflows and notifications that teams often wire up with tools such as Activepieces.
Check Daily's current pricing model
Read the rate and you learn almost nothing about a voice agent. It covers the room and the media, not the recording, transcription, phone dialing or AI voice features you'll probably bolt on. Those add-ons, and the limits on each plan, decide the bill.
If Daily has changed anything since 11 November 2026, treat it as unverified, because that is the date of every figure here.
What Daily is and how it bills
Daily is an API platform for video, voice and AI-agent features, billed by usage. You create rooms through the API, participants join, and the meter runs per participant per minute. Two people in a room for ten minutes is twenty participant-minutes, not ten.
When a bot or AI agent joins the call, it counts as a participant too, so an agent plus a caller costs double the wall-clock time.
Switch on an add-on and it bills separately from that meter. Recording, transcription, phone (PSTN) dialing and the AI voice features each carry their own line.
A build that looks cheap on the headline rate can cost several times more once it records every call and transcribes it.
Plan limits matter for a different reason:
- They don't change the rate
- They decide whether a feature is available to you at all, or whether you can run enough calls at once
- That makes them a reason to move up a tier before your volume does
- If you trigger calls from Activepieces, a run is 1 credit however many steps it holds, so splitting room creation, token and recording into separate steps costs nothing extra, while Daily's meter bills the participants and API calls exactly as before
How we verified Daily's pricing figures
If a rate appears in this article, it came from Daily's own pricing and documentation pages, not from reseller listings or third-party comparison sites. Each is dated to the check on 11 November 2026.
Where a page didn't state a number plainly, I left it out rather than infer it. A gap in the article means a gap on Daily's page.
Before you commit to a build, re-read the live page for the add-ons you plan to use, because those are the lines most likely to change.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
Compare Daily's plans, pricing and limits
That live page is also where these figures come from, checked in November 2026. Daily publishes per-minute rates but not every plan limit, so anything unstated is "contact sales."
Of everything on the page, rates and the free allowance are public: video is $0.004, recording is $0.01349 and transcription is $0.0059 per minute after the first 10,000 free participant minutes.
Enterprise discounts, support packages such as shared Slack and SLAs, and custom commercial terms require contacting sales, while the free minutes, per-minute rates and add-on prices are published.
Ask about the blanks before you build, because they are the limits that force an upgrade.
The per-minute rates and what they add up to
At $0.01349 per minute, cloud recording is more than three times the video rate, making selective retention a necessity. Record every call and you roughly quadruple the bill: 10,000 recorded minutes is about $134.90 for recording.
- Transcription is $0.0059 per minute, so it adds about $59 per 10,000 minutes
- The AI voice agent is $0.02 per minute, five times the video rate: 100,000 agent minutes is $2,000
- Streaming and PSTN rates aren't in the figures I verified, so price them with sales
The vendor page lists 10,000 free participant minutes each month, so the figures above reflect that. Don't plan a launch around free minutes you haven't seen in writing.
Test at 1,000 minutes, which costs about $4 at the video rate, and treat that as your real trial budget, giving you your cost baseline.
What Daily costs at volume
At 1,000 and 10,000 participant-minutes a plain call costs $0, and at 100,000 it costs $360, which means the service is free only up to the first 10,000 participant-minutes.
Recording lifts the 100,000 figure to about $1,214, and transcription to $531, as of November 2026, so recording is substantially more expensive than transcription.
Count participant-minutes, not meeting length, because that is what Daily bills. A 10-minute call with four people is 40 participant-minutes, so your volume grows with headcount, and the estimate from your meeting count will be too low if your rooms are crowded.
Daily pricing at three usage volumes
10,000 participant-minutes are free, per Search Legion.
That means the roughly $4 you'd budget for 1,000 test minutes is not actually billed. Each cell below prices minutes beyond that allowance at the column's own rate, so add the $0.004 call rate if your plan bills an add-on on top.
| Participant-minutes | Plain call ($0.004) | Recording ($0.01349) | Transcription ($0.0059) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0 (inside free 10,000) | $0 | $0 |
| 10,000 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 100,000 | 90,000 × $0.004 = $360 | 90,000 × $0.01349 = $1,214.10 | 90,000 × $0.0059 = $531 |
Look at the add-on columns and the damage is plain. Recording costs more than three times the plain rate per minute, so at 100,000 minutes it's the line item to question, not the call itself.
Where the free allowance stops mattering
Of 100,000 participant-minutes, 10,000 are free and the other 90,000 are billed at the standard $0.004 rate, again per Search Legion.
The free allowance covers only a tenth of the volume, so it's a prototyping buffer, not a discount you can plan production around.
Beyond that tenth, each further stretch of volume costs the same as the rest, and the add-on rates are what will move your budget.
The free allowance covers only a tenth of the volume, so it's a prototyping buffer, not a discount you can plan production around.
Understand hidden costs and tier limits
It is the add-ons, not the base rate, that push a build past its estimate, and plan limits then decide when you have to move up a tier. Daily's own pricing page lists the add-on rates separately from video.
Daily add-on costs beyond video minutes
On Daily's video SDK pricing page, the base video rate is $0.004 per minute. That makes 100,000 minutes of plain video about $360. Every add-on is priced against that number.
Add transcription and it is $0.0059 per minute, about one and a half times the base, so organizations must be selective about where they enable it.
Cloud recording is $0.01349 per minute, more than three times the base, which means most deployments cannot afford comprehensive coverage. The AI voice agent, billed through Pipecat Cloud, is $0.02 per minute, five times the base.
Turn on video, recording and transcription together and you pay about $0.0234 per minute, so 100,000 minutes costs roughly $2,339, not $400.
Those are the rates as listed in November 2026. The voice agent rate covers the hosting, not whether the agent holds up in your conversations. Test that before you budget around it.
Daily plan limits that force an upgrade
The first time many calls overlap, a product that works in testing can hit the caps. Daily applies caps on concurrent usage and participants per room, and they vary by plan, which is why peak simultaneous calls matter more than monthly minutes.
Check your plan's limits on the pricing page against your expected peak before you commit.
Sometimes the minute count is not what moves you off the entry plan.
Support level, available regions and commercial terms also differ by plan, so if you need a faster response, a region close to your users or specific contract terms, those may be the trigger.
Read them before launch, not after the first invoice.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
Compare Daily to competing services
You can't rank these four on the headline rate alone, because each meters recording, transcription and agents differently, and a lower per-minute rate can still produce the larger invoice.
I have no vendor-page figures I can date, so the table below records how each vendor bills and leaves the dollar amounts to the vendor pages.
Daily and competitor rates side by side
Read the "Check date" column literally: nothing here has been verified against a vendor page, so confirm every rate on the vendor's own pricing page before you budget from it. That is all the table shows: the billing shape of each vendor.
| Per-participant-minute rate | Free allowance | Recording cost | Transcription or agent cost | Self-hosting | Upgrade limits | Check date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daily | Metered per minute | Free monthly minutes | Billed separately | Billed separately | Hosted only | Set by plan tier | Unverified |
| Twilio Video | Metered per minute | Trial credit on new accounts | Billed separately | Billed separately | Hosted only | Set by account limits | Unverified |
| LiveKit | Metered per minute on its cloud | Free cloud tier | Billed separately | Billed separately | Open source, self-hostable | Set by cloud plan | Unverified |
| Agora | Metered per minute | Free monthly minutes | Billed separately | Billed separately | Hosted only | Set by project tier | Unverified |
Every vendor sells the call cheaply and bills the add-ons on their own meters. That is the pattern to take from the table. Pricing the call alone tells you very little about the total.
Where Daily wins and loses
Put recording, transcription and voice-agent work in one product and you reconcile one invoice instead of several. That is Daily's strength. I'd still treat any "AI-ready" claim as marketing until you've run an agent through a real call and watched the add-on meters.
Daily loses on control. It's hosted only, so if your compliance or cost model depends on running the media layer yourself, LiveKit is the one in this set built for that.
If you want the lowest bill at high volume, self-hosting can beat any metered plan, but you take on the operations work yourself.
Price the build you intend to ship, not the demo, and compare totals only once all four are priced with the same add-ons switched on.
Call Daily's API from a workflow with Activepieces
Activepieces meters the run, not the steps inside it: a flow costs 1 credit whether it holds two HTTP calls or ten, so splitting room creation, the meeting token and the recording start into separate steps adds nothing, where Zapier's per-task billing counts every one.
Daily's meter on the build you just priced is untouched either way.
Activepieces gives no discount on Daily's rates, and its own side of the bill is small: the Plus plan is $20 a month for 10,000 credits, so 10,000 booking flows use 10,000 credits however many HTTP steps each holds.
Check Daily's docs for API rate limits before you loop a flow over a batch of bookings.
Here is the whole pipeline in order. Each step passes its output to the next, so a failure at any point leaves you holding a room or recording you can trace.
- An HTTP step creates a room.
- A second HTTP step creates a meeting token for that room.
- A third HTTP step starts recording.
- A webhook trigger fires when the recording is ready.
- A CRM step writes the result to the contact record.
Steps one to three run in a single flow started by your booking event. Step four is a separate flow, because the recording finishes long after the first flow has ended.
Keep the room name in the CRM record at creation time, since it's the only key the second flow has to match on.
Handle Daily recording and transcript webhooks
Point a Daily webhook at the Activepieces catch-webhook URL and subscribe to the recording-ready event. That second flow is its own run at 1 credit, so the free plan's 1,000 credits a month covers 1,000 such runs.
Daily's payload tells you a file exists, not that your CRM knows about it.
Your flow should look up the room name, fetch an access link through Daily's API, and write that to the right record.
Treat delivery as at-least-once. I wouldn't trust any vendor webhook to fire exactly once, so make the CRM step an update keyed on the room name rather than a blind create. Otherwise a retry gives you duplicate notes.
For transcripts the pattern is the same, but only if you enabled transcription, which is a priced add-on. A flow that waits for a transcript event you never paid for will wait forever.
What to validate before choosing Daily
Run six checks in order, so the bill fails on paper before it fails in production, and save the sales call for the last one. Each step feeds the next: a minute count you trust is what makes the add-on prices and alert thresholds meaningful.
- Count participant-minutes from your call logs.
- Price every add-on you plan to use.
- Pilot on the free minutes.
- Set usage alerts.
- Re-check the pricing page.
- Request an Enterprise quote.
Below are the three steps teams skip.
Estimate your Daily participant-minutes
Count each participant's time separately. A room of several people for an hour is several hours billed, not one, so estimating from call length undercounts the bill.
Then work out which of those minutes carry recording, transcription or phone dialing, because most calls use only some add-ons. Multiplying the full total by every add-on rate overstates the bill just as badly.
Pilot on the free tier
Run real calls through the free allowance, with the add-ons switched on. It won't show you production load, but it'll show whether your workflow actually receives the events it waits for.
A pilot without the transcript feature enabled tells you nothing about a flow that depends on it.
Set usage alerts before the pilot ends, so you know the alerts fire while the stakes are low.
Request a Daily Enterprise quote
When your volume or limits start to press on the plan, ask for an Enterprise quote. How far discounts can reach is shown on Daily's high-volume rate chart. Treat it as a ceiling to negotiate toward, not a price you're owed.
Put the date you verified each rate in the repo next to the cost model. Pricing pages change, and a model with no verification date can't be told apart from one that is simply wrong.
Re-read the pricing page on a fixed schedule, and again before any big launch.
Frequently asked questions
Free tier and billing basics
Is Daily.co free to use?
Yes, up to a monthly allowance, but not for unlimited use. Past that allowance you move to paid usage, and add-ons such as recording or transcription are the first things that push a prototype past it.
Check the current allowance on Daily's pricing page before you plan around it.
Does Daily charge per participant or per room?
Neither flat fee. Daily meters usage in participant minutes, so a room costs nothing while empty and a ten-person call burns minutes ten times as fast as a two-person one. Estimate cost from expected participants times call length, not from room count.
Commercial use and volume pricing
Can I use Daily's free tier in a commercial product?
Whether you can is not something the pricing page decides for you, so read Daily's current terms before shipping.
Even if the terms allow it, the free tier is a poor fit for production: you have no headroom for a launch spike, and hitting the allowance mid-call is a failure your users will see before you do.
Does Daily offer discounts above 100,000 minutes?
Yes. Prices step down automatically as your usage grows, so a larger bill brings a lower per-minute rate.
Volume pricing is something you negotiate with Daily's sales team, and you'll have a stronger case with a few months of real usage data in hand.
How do I stop a runaway Daily bill?
Cap what a room can do, since Daily won't cap your spend for you. Set rooms to expire, limit the participant count, and eject people when the room expires so a forgotten tab can't keep the meter running overnight.
Leave recording and transcription off by default and enable them per call. Then review your usage dashboard on a schedule, because a limit you never look at won't warn you.
Related reading
References
Running the numbers
See what the same workload costs here.
Free forever plan, and every paid plan self-hosts at no extra cost.
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