February 20th’s announcement of the pricing model for BeyondATC led to a significant amount of discussion within the community, stemming from concerns of high price and a confusing pay-as-you-go model. The developer has heard this feedback – and is revising their pricing model.
The new model can be summarized in 4 key points:
- 1Price reduced from $59.99 to $29.99
- Basic voice model is now included in the base pack
- Push to talk is now included in the base pack
- Premium voice model will require a $10 top up every 15-20 flights
Captain, the lead of BeyondATC, told FSElite in a statement “after all the feedback we got from the pricing model we’ve reached back out to our third party service providers to see if we could get a better deal with them. After a couple of weeks of back and forth I believe we finally have a pricing model that is so much better, easier to understand and cheaper across all dimensions.”
The pay-as-you-go model has transitioned from being tracked by Transmission Time Units, to being tracked by Number of Characters – when using the premium voice model for the controller. The developer has estimated that doing this will use 15,000 characters per flight. The top-up pack available for purchase will come in for $9.99, and top-up the user with an additional 250,000 characters – which should come out to requiring this top-up every 15-20 flights. This cost per flight should come out to about $0.60/flight for the user. This pricing model per transmission is the same as it was in the prior model, it has just been simplified for understanding.
The estimations assume that the traffic around you will be communicating with the controller using the Basic voice models instead of the premium voice models. Captain told FSElite that “the focus for me is really on the new way we intend this to be used. The new basic model sounds really good, I don’t see many people using premium for both traffic and controllers. I’m leaving it there as an option, but I don’t think that is the focus anymore. The quality gap has been severely lessened.”
Notably, the basic voice model and the push-to-talk feature are now included in the base pack, and this base pack has also decreased in price from $59.99 to $29.99.
The full announcement can be viewed in the video below:
