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Frequently Asked Questions - Pricing, customization and terms

How much does the mesibo costs?

mesibo is free to start, providing users with initial free credits worth $50 upon sign-up, valid for 30 days.

Following this period, Mesibo offers Pay-as-you-go with reasonable pricing for both its On-Premise and Cloud offerings. This means you only pay for the services you use, and once you cease using them, there are no additional charges or termination fees. For more details on pricing, please refer to the mesibo pricing pageopen_in_new.

Why mesibo does not charge for video and voice calling?

mesibo follows a fair and ethical pricing model, distinguishing itself from other platforms by not charging for unused resources. Most peer-to-peer calls on mesibo do not consume mesibo's bandwidth, and hence mesibo does not charge for peer-to-peer calls. This means that your app users can make unlimited video and voice calls without incurring extra costs.

This approach reflects Mesibo's commitment to offering cost-effective and ethically priced solutions for real-time communication, setting it apart from other companies in the industry.

Does mesibo offer free services to educational and non-profit organizations?

Yes, mesibo is completely free for educational and research institutes, students, non-profit organizations, or other non-commercial apps for a good cause.

Is there any agreement that we have to sign to use mesibo?

There is a Master Service Agreement / Terms document available which is applicable to all the mesibo users. You or mesibo will not be required to sign (e-sign or physically), accept, or otherwise agree to any other documentation to use mesibo services.

What are the limits on free tier usage?

The free tier/credits are provided for evaluation purposes only, and as such, there are fair usage limits:

  • Free credits MUST be utilized for development purposes exclusively and should not be used for commercial usage.
  • To prevent misuse, free credits are distributed across the evaluation period, resulting in daily usage limits.
  • There are restrictions on the number of users, groups, group members, and group call duration.

Nevertheless, these limits are reasonable and should not impede your ability to evaluate any of Mesibo's features.

What is 'Monthly Active Users' (MAU)?

Monthly Active User (MAU) signifies the unique monthly active users during a billing cycle.

MAU is counted only when a user connects to a mesibo server (cloud or on-premise) within a monthly billing cycle, engages in any activities (sending or receiving messages, calls, etc.), or any real-time or backend API operations are performed on the user, for example, create, edit, group membership, etc. In the case of on-premise, all messages and real-time API operations are performed through your server and hence not charged for. To further clarify, it will be only counted as one even for multiple operations within a monthly billing cycle.

What is Concurrent Users (peak connections/simultaneous connection)?

"Concurrent Users (CU)" is a metric representing the maximum number of users connected to the Mesibo server simultaneously at any given moment. Generally, CU is estimated to be around 10% of Daily Active Users (DAU), which, in turn, is typically 50% of Monthly Active Users (MAU). It's important to note that these metrics may vary between apps based on their nature. Monitoring and calculating Concurrent Users will assist you in determining the most suitable mesibo deployment for your app, both presently and in the future.

Concurrent users are also referred to as peak or simultaneous connections.

How are the monthly active users (MAU) counted when utilizing the mesibo multi-device feature?

mesibo multi-device feature allows your users to log in from multiple devices (app or web) simultaneously and automatically sync messages, calls, etc between them. This offers your users a consistent and seamless experience across all devices. If the multi-device feature is used, mesibo needs to maintain a real-time connection and sync database from each device and hence each additional device will be counted as a separate MAU.

If your application doesn't require the multi-device feature, your users can still log in from multiple devices without incurring extra charges for additional users. In this scenario, when a user logs in from a new device, the connection from other devices will be terminated, allowing the user to maintain only one active connection at a time.

What is Message Rate Limit?

Message rate limit (throttling) is referred to as a total number of messages that can be sent by all your users in any given second. Typically, a message rate/second for an application like WhatsApp is 0.05% of MAU (based on public stats). mesibo assigned much higher rate limit than that so you should encounter rate limit only in rare circumstances.

Do Voice and Video call quality differ in FREE and PAYG Plan?

Absolutely not - quality remains the same whether you are in a free or a premium plan. However, call duration could be limited in the free plan.

I will be using TURN servers. How much the TURN server cost for a 60-minutes call?

The mesibo charges only for the TURN bandwidth and not per-minute usage. The reason is that the TURN server is only active for a short duration, and hence it is not fair to charge for the entire call duration. Generally, the TURN server is active during the call initialization and then becomes inactive once the peer-to-peer connection is established. Hence, you will only be charged for bandwidth consumed during the active duration. The active duration can be longer if the participants are behind no-cooperative NATs/firewalls or can be a fraction of the total duration (say 30 seconds for a 60-minute call).

The bandwidth consumption depends upon the call quality and the active duration. Typically an HD (720p) call for 100 minutes will consume around 1 GB of bandwidth per participant. A non-HD call for 250 minutes consumes around 1GB per participant. Hence, depending on your call quality and TURN active duration, you can estimate the TURN bandwidth and the cost. You can use the mesibo console to monitor TURN usage and charges.

Is there any limitation on the number of applications, users, or groups? What happens if I exceed the limitations?

There are no limitations once you are a paid user. However, mesibo has intelligent algorithms to detect unfair usage and abuse patterns and in such conditions, requests from your users may be throttled.

The free trial has a limitation on the number of users and groups.

Are there any feature differences between the PAYG and FREE plan?

No, all the features are available in all the plans.

What happens if my apps exceed the credits?

We usually do not throttle your app immediately, unless in extreme situations. We will send you an email and also inform your backend using the webhook when your app usage exceeds available credits. We will throttle or temporarily disable your app only if you do not take any action in 24 hours even after these notifications. We will further wait for 7 more days before we delete your data.

How do I know how much I am spending?

The Mesibo console is the best way to keep a tab on your usage and charges. The Mesibo console is updated at regular intervals with the usage and corresponding charges.

Do I need to change my app if I move from free to PAYG plan?

Absolutely not! There are zero changes to the way you deploy your application or use our APIs irrespective of you are using our free or PAYG plan.

What kind of support do you receive in PAYG vs Free plan?

We have 24-hour support and monitoring available from our Singapore and United States offices. For any queries, you can contact us via email at support@mesibo.com.

How to avail of free offer for students, educational institutes and non-profit organizations?

mesibo is completely free for educational and research institutes, students, non-profit organizations, or other non-commercial apps for a good cause.

To avail of this offer, your app must be completely non-commercial (no charges, no ads), must not use other commercial paid services, and must attribute mesibo for the mesibo services your app is using on all the key screens. You may also need to use mesibo on-premise.

To prevent misuse of our free offer, your mesibo account must use your educational institute or non-profit organization's email address (not the free or alumni email address). We will also require proof(s) of current affiliation with the educational institute or non-profit organization.

Once your app is ready and live on respective app stores, send us a link to review. If all is good, we will mark your app for free usage.

What Payment Methods do you accept?

Our payment service provider accepts credit cards and GPay. We also accept Wire Transfers to our bank in Singapore for the larger payment (you need to be an existing paid user for making wire transfers).

How long are mesibo credits valid?

The credit validity varies from 30 days to 1 year depending on the payment amount. You will see the exact validity on the payment screen when you initiate a payment and also in your invoice. You can also check validity in Mesibo Console, under "My Account -> Payment History". Your unused credits do not carry forward and they will be invalid after the validity period.

Can you extend the validity of my mesibo credits?

When you buy credits, we allocate system resources for you to ensure that you have the highest level of service experience using mesibo. Since we have already allocated resources for you, we are unable to extend the validity of your credits. If you require longer validity, we recommend buying credits for a larger amount which gives you the longest duration of validity.

How do I get invoices or receipts for my payments?

Mesibo sends a payment receipt after receiving each of your payments. The payment receipt is sent automatically to the account email address. Please note that we will not send payment receipts to any other email addresses (even if you request them). The payment receipt will have the following information.

  • If you make a payment via wire transfer, the payment receipt will have the amount received, the name of your company (as provided by you), address (as provided by you), mesibo account email address, and mesibo account ID.
  • For credit card payments, it will have the amount received, the mesibo account email address, and the mesibo account ID.
  • We do not generate invoices or send any other documents.

Additionally, all your payment information is available in Mesibo Console, under "My Account -> Payment History" with the payment date and the amount. You can take a print of it if you need it for your records. We do not provide any additional or duplicate invoices other than those sent automatically.