Updated – BeyondATC has since revised its pricing model which you can read about here. As a result, the calculator is now deprecated.
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Following Tuesday’s unveiling of BeyondATC’s pricing model, there has been a lot of discussion concerning the potential costs for individual users. The main point of contention seems to be with BeyondATC’s purchasable units, which translate into transmission time for a Basic and Premium Voice Model. Some users have also criticised the ‘freemium’ model, where users would miss out on premium features and instead have to use the Offline Voice Model, costing no units but providing a lesser audio variety and quality.
In order to give a better understanding of the different Voice Models and the audio quality and features, the team has expanded the ‘Voice Samples’ section on their website with many examples. The samples now include several variants for the Offline, Basic and Premium Voice Model, including different regional accents. BeyondATC has also updated its usage information with a hybrid mode that uses a Basic or Premium Voice Model for the controller, but the Offline Voice Model for traffic. The controller will still talk to other traffic with the selected Voice Model; so far it does not seem like it will be possible to separate the controller voice model for traffic and the user.
Some users have also questioned the need to purchase additional units after running out of units from their initial purchase of BeyondATC. While the Offline Mode uses a local AI engine to generate voice, this is not true for the Basic and Premium voice models. These use an online service to interpret your request and generate an AI response. BeyondATC has chosen this pricing model where you effectively only need to pay for the Premium service if you use it, rather than a subscription model for everyone regardless of actual usage. The Offline Voice Model is always usable and does not cost any units for transmission time.
In order to allow you to give a more accurate overview of the costs you might incur per flight or month when using BeyondATC, we have put together this handy little calculator for you.
The Low/Medium/High estimates are based on the information that BeyondATC supplied on their website, as a range of TTS Usage/Flight was created.
One important note when using this calculator – the inputs for the TTS Usage/Flight for hybrid voice models (different models for Controller/Traffic) are based on interpolations of the data that BeyondATC provided – and thus the results for those circumstances should be seen as estimates.
This tool was created based on the information available on the BeyondATC website, and has not been vetted by the BeyondATC team.