Daily Video API - Add video calls to your app, in minutes.

@heff Thanks, @heff! We really love MUX. Your API is one of our inspirations -- so well designed.

@foundingmom Thanks, Jill!

@eunjooncho Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate it. Re: how we compare with Twilio. Twilio is great - we built our telephone dial-in capability on top of Twilio's APIs/infrastructure and we use their video infrastructure for some of our larger-call capabilities. The Twilio video APIs are low level APIs for developers who want to manage media streams, user sessions, and other elements of a video call themselves. That gives you a lot of control, but also means you have to learn a lot about cross-browser differences and other "corner cases" in order to build a production-quality product. And you have to implement the UI. Our goal was to design an API that would let you add a production-quality video call experience to your product in literally five minutes, for many use cases, and a day or so for more complicated integrations. I think we achieved that. There isn't any other video calling API that makes this possible. Basically, we think lots and lots of products could use video in useful and interesting ways, and we want to help make that happen. If signing in with Google didn't work for you, it might either be because you have third-party cookies disabled, or are running an ad blocker that prevents Google's oauth library from loading. Any chance either of those is true? You could try in an Incognito mode window, if you don't mind giving us more feedback about this. What browser/platform were you using?

@kwindla amazing! thanks for the detailed feedback! the Google signup seems to work now by the way...

@mendorshikh Thanks!

@sivola Thanks for the questions. 1. Browser calls are free because, in our business model, browser calls are a "freemium" entry point for upgrading to our hardware, and now to our API. We've gotten really helpful viral growth from the browser calls being free, but of course to build a company that keeps shipping great tech we need to charge for some things! The API provides a lot of value -- embedding, customization of workflows, and the ability to completely remove all Daily.co branding. So we charge for the API. 2. A room is a unique video call virtual location (which is equivalent to a URL). At a minimum, you need one room per URL that is available for users to join in the future. So, deleted or expired rooms don't count against your total available rooms. But a URL that is available now, or has an 'nbf' and will be available in the future, is an active room that counts against your total. 3. We're adding info to the pricing page! Thanks for asking about that. The cost is $0.004/participant-minute for calls with 4 participants or fewer, and $0.01/participant-minute for calls with more than 4 participants.

@kwindla thanks for the detailed reply; couple more comments: 1. ok, but it the freemium model with hw upgrade as a path is working, then it should work even better with APIs: more calls, more hw upgrades through third party apps developed via APIs. Of course if it doesn't work, I understand the switch to paid APIs. Problem is as a developer I'm going to compete against your free calls. Why a user would pay me to jump on a multi-user call if they can get it for free from your own service? 2. Ok, but to start a call, do I need one URL per call? That means even with the paid $49 plan I can only have 5 calls/mo? Or if we keep creating/deleting rooms, we can have up to 5 concurrent anyway? 3. Ok, so the more users per call you have, the more expensive it becomes per minute. Interesting.

@sivola If you're happy with the free browser calls, we're happy you're happy. If you need the extra functionality that the API provides, that's great too! No worries either way. You can reuse URLs as much as you want. And you can create and delete as many URLs as you want. We're all about flexibility. :-) The $49/month plan allows you to have 1,000 concurrent rooms. If you bump up against that limit you can either upgrade to the $199/month plan or delete some rooms.

@kwindla I think one of us misunderstood the use case :). I was interested in using your APIs to offer video call capabilities in our product, not to use your APIs to enhance that service for internal purposes. That's why I mentioned that from a user perspective free browser calls would be "competitive" with ours that must be paid because of your biz model. I assume my use case is possible, i.e. offer video calls as part of our product through your APIs to third party users, correct?

@sivola Yes, definitely! We designed the APIs specifically for people to add video call capabilities to their products. What does your product do and how do you charge for it? There are no free video call APIs, because as usage scales, costs go up! If you're enabling large numbers of people to do video calls from within your product, somehow the cost of the signaling servers, TURN servers, and other infrastructure has to get paid for. Our current API customers cover a lot of interesting use cases (some of them have surprised us). But, generally speaking, either 1) the cost of the video calls is trivial compared to the basic cost of the product (for example, 1:1 teaching/tutoring/coaching), or 2) video calls are a premium feature that helps to justify upgrading to a higher pricing tier (for example, a collaboration tool that offers integrated video calls and meeting recording to "enterprise plan" customers).