The highly anticipated ATC add-on BeyondATC has revealed their pricing model for its release later this year. Though no release date has been announced yet, BeyondATC has been eagerly anticipated by the community as it aims to provide a more realistic and immersive air traffic control experience, using AI as an underlying technology to realise this.
Upon release, BeyondATC will cost $59.99. This is a one-time lifetime purchase giving you access to all features and future updates, although some limitations apply. The pricing model is split up in three different Voice Models: Offline, Basic and Premium.
The Offline Voice Model generates the ATC voice locally using BeyondATC’s custom AI engine. The Basic Voice Model uses 100+ medium quality voices with “many accents”, and the Premium Voice Model features 250+ high quality voices with accents from “every country”. Rather than locally, these latter two Voice Models rely on a connection to generate an AI voice.
Upon purchasing BeyondATC, the user will get access to 3.750.000 units of transmission time and 6.250 units of the Premium Voice Model, where the units represent the transmission time. The team gave some indications on how quick these units might be spent with different scenarios of usage. Assuming a user uses no other traffic in the simulator, the team estimates that a flight could cost between 8.000 and 15.000 units of transmission time using the Basic Voice Model. This could increase from 25.000 to 45.000 units using the Premium Voice Model. Using traffic in the simulator would see these ranges increase from 50k – 200k units for the Basic Voice Model and 150k-600k for the Premium Voice Model. The Offline Voice Model uses no units at all and can be used at all times regardless of a user’s units.
Assuming you’re using the Premium Voice Model, this means in the worst case scenario you could see yourself running out of units after 6 flights using traffic, or 83 flights if no traffic is used. Using the Basic Voice Model, assuming the higher transmission time indicated by BeyondATC, this would be 18 flights with traffic or 250 flights without. According to the FAQ shared on the website, BeyondATC will allow you to customise the settings so that you can use the Offline Voice Model for traffic and Basic or Premium for the controller.
After running out of units, BeyondATC offers three different packages to purchase units again. For $4.99 you can purchase 500.000 units, whereas $9.99 gets you 1.500.000 units and $19.99 3.300.000. You can also continue using the Offline Voice Model, which does not cost any units to use, but features a lower quality audio set than the other Voice Models. The team emphasises that this model has been chosen to avoid making BeyondATC a subscription service, and that there are no plans for a subscription in the future.
The full announcement can be read over on the BeyondATC website. It includes three voice samples for the Offline, Basic and Premium Voice Model respectively, to give you an indication of the audio quality in the different Voice Models.
