23 October 2026 · Site Methodology & Corrections · 5 min read
Our Agora pricing page has listed "Video 2K+ ~$15.99+/1,000 min" as the top tier since July. I went back to re-check it against Agora's own pricing docs today and found two things our page never had: a disclosed $35.99 tier above 2K, and the actual billing mechanism behind every row in that table -- a "Standard minute" conversion ratio that ranges from 1x (audio) to 36x (2K+) and multiplies on top of the per-1,000-minute sticker price. Our page explained the per-participant stream count. It never mentioned the resolution multiplier stacked on top of that.
Agora's docs give the per-1,000-Standard-minute rate and a separate conversion ratio for how many Standard minutes one real minute of each resolution burns:
| Resolution | Rate /1,000 std-min | Std-minute ratio | Real cost / 1,000 real min |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio | $0.99 | 1:1 | $0.99 |
| HD (720p) | $3.99 | 1:4 | $15.96 |
| Full HD (1080p) | $8.99 | 1:9 | $80.91 |
| 2K | $15.99 | 1:16 | $255.84 |
| 2K+ | $35.99 | 1:36 | $1,295.64 |
That last column is the number that actually lands on an invoice, per subscribed stream, before you even factor in how many participants are in the call. Our page quoted column two -- the sticker price -- and left out column three entirely, which is where the real cost is hiding.
The sticker price makes HD look like the cheap option at $3.99 -- barely above audio's $0.99. But a real minute of HD video is 4 Standard minutes, not 1, so the effective rate per 1,000 real minutes is 4 x $3.99 = $15.96 -- almost exactly the 2K tier's sticker price, even though you're paying the HD rate. The sticker price and the real price only match at audio, where the ratio is 1:1. Every resolution above that is quietly billed as if it were roughly one tier higher once you convert back to real minutes.
At the top of the table, 2K+ at a 1:36 ratio means a single subscribed 2K+ stream costs about $1.30 per real minute -- not per 1,000 minutes, per minute. That's about 1,309x the audio rate for one stream. Our page's old "~$15.99+" guess for the top tier undersold the real number by more than 20x once the multiplier is applied, and that's before counting a second participant.
None of this replaces what our page already said about participant count -- it adds to it. A 1:1 HD call has two subscribed streams (each side subscribes to the other), so it's 2 streams x 4 Standard-minute ratio x $3.99/1,000 = $0.0319/real minute for the call, not the $0.00798 you'd get from sticker price x stream count alone. A 4-person Full HD group call, where each participant subscribes to the other three, is 12 stream-subscriptions x 9 x $8.99/1,000 -- about $0.97/real minute for the whole call. Estimate cost as streams x Standard-minute ratio x rate, not streams x sticker price.
Agora's docs list a separate, lower rate for the broadcast audience role versus the interactive participant role -- audience HD is $1.99/1,000 Standard minutes versus $3.99 for a full publish/subscribe participant, same resolution. For a one-to-many live stream (a webinar, a drop-in audio room with a handful of speakers and a crowd of listeners), putting listeners on the audience role instead of giving every viewer a full interactive subscription is the one setting in this whole pricing model that actually cuts the bill, roughly in half for that portion of the usage. A 1:1 call or small group call doesn't have an audience to downgrade, so this only helps the broadcast/live-streaming use case specifically.
I wrote "~$15.99+" in July off the headline sticker-price list on the pricing page, the same place anyone comparing Agora against Kit en direct or Twilio Video would look first. The Standard-minute conversion table lives one level deeper, in the billing docs, not the pricing page itself -- so the number that was technically on the page the whole time just never made it into our table, the same gap as a provider changing a number under a tab nobody re-opens. The free 10,000-minutes/month tier is denominated in Standard minutes too, which our page got right in spirit but didn't connect to the same ratio table.
Updated the Agora guide's pricing table to add the missing 2K+ row at $35.99, added the Standard-minute ratio column next to the sticker price so the real per-real-minute cost is visible instead of implied, and added the audience-vs-participant rate split for live-streaming use cases. The core guidance doesn't change: Agora's free tier makes it the cheapest option for small apps and 1:1 audio/HD; the multiplier is what makes group video and high-resolution calls expensive fast, more than the sticker price alone suggests.
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Checked directly against Agora's pricing and billing documentation, 2026-10-23. Reference figures, not live quotes -- confirm current rates and your account's package terms directly with Agora before budgeting.