What Is An AI Fair Use Pricing Policy & How Does It Impact MiaRec's Pricing [Incl. Price Calculator]?

Fair Use Policy (FUP)

A Fair Use Policy (FUP) is a set of guidelines a service provider defines to ensure equitable access to services. This is not to be confused with the Fair Use Doctrine, which permits using copyrighted material without permission in certain circumstances.

The Fair Use Policy encompasses various restrictions on how the service can be used, including prohibitions against misuse, abuse, and activities that violate laws or service terms. It ensures that services are used in a manner that is fair to all users by preventing any single user from excessively consuming resources, which could negatively impact other users' experience.

Example: permissible number of pieces of content, images, or AI insights generated per hour.

Fair Use Pricing Policy

On the other hand, a Fair Use Pricing Policy specifically addresses how AI services are billed based on that usage. Essentially, the AI service provider determines what a fair and reasonable use of their service is and creates a pricing model to reflect that. In other words, this policy ensures that users are charged appropriately for their consumption and that pricing remains sustainable for providers and users.

Fair Use Pricing Policy often involves tiered pricing, where different levels of service usage are priced accordingly and include limitations on the service according to the normal expected usage. Some vendors may also include measures to throttle or limit usage if it exceeds what is considered fair under the user's pricing plan.

Differences

• Focus: The Fair Use Policy focuses on equitable and lawful usage of services, ensuring that all users have fair access and preventing misuse. The Fair Use Pricing Policy, however, is more concerned with the financial aspect, ensuring that users pay according to their usage levels and that excessive use is managed through pricing adjustments or service throttling.
• Implementation: The Fair Use Policy typically includes usage guidelines, restrictions, and prohibitions, while the Fair Use Pricing Policy includes pricing tiers, usage caps, and potential overage charges.

Tokens in AI Fair Usage Pricing Policies

In the context of AI, and particularly in usage-based pricing policies, a "token" is a unit of measurement used to quantify the amount of text processed by the AI model. This can be used for prompts and text generated or text processed. 

Tokens can be thought of as pieces of words or language components. They are not always complete words but can include parts of words, spaces, and punctuation marks. One token equals approximately 4 characters (in English) or 0.75 words.

To give you better context, a one-minute conversation equals about 200 tokens. To process a 15-minute conversation using AI, you would need approximately 1,700 tokens:

• 15 minutes x 150 words/minute = 2,250 words
• 2,250 words x 0.75 words/token = 1,687.5 tokens

Depending on what you are asking the AI to do, the AI might need to take multiple passes through the transcript to answer your question. For example, we recommend asking the AI to answer no more than five questions per pass-through for an automated scorecard to maximize scoring accuracy. This means that to score a 15-minute conversation with a scorecard containing 15 questions, you will need around 5,000 tokens (5 minutes x 150 words/minute x 0.75 words/token x 3 passes) = 5,062.5 tokens.

Both input and output tokens are counted towards the total number of tokens used, which impacts the cost. For example, if a prompt uses 500 tokens and the response uses 1,000 tokens, the total usage would be 1,500. In addition, tokens will have a different price based on the AI's model complexity and performance capabilities. For example, a more advanced model like OpenAI’s GPT-4o might cost more per token than a less complex model such as GPT-4o-mini. 

It is also important to know that you will be charged based on actual usage. You can always see how many tokens you have used, and you can set a cap on the amount of tokens you use per month, so you are in full control at all times. 

Alright, now that the theory is out of the way, let's examine how it applies to MiaRec's pricing.

MiaRec offers a tiered pricing model that provides adequate Conversation Intelligence and Contact Center AI capabilities to contact centers as they grow.

• One minute audio recording in WAV dual-channel format equals approximately ~1.92 MB based on 256 kbps at 30 fps. 
• MiaRec's Fair Use Overage Charges: $0.20 per GB/month and $0.01 per transcription minute. 
  
• Storage capacity is billed by the user but allocated to the organization. In other words, the storage capacity included in the administrator and supervisor licenses is added to the storage pool of the organization and can be used by the agents. 

For its Premium plan, MiaRec uses tokens to determine its Fair Use pricing policy. MiaRec will allocate five million (5,000,000) tokens per user per month. Beyond these limts, every one million tokens used is billed at $5.00. Note that your team can monitor usage and manually set monthly limits for the number of tokens used.

Screenshot: Token usage tracker, found in the MiaRec platform at Administration > Speech Analytics > AI Assistant > Usage

With 5,000,000 tokens per user/month, an average organization can utilize them to automatically score all user calls, generate 3-4 AI insights, track 40 topics, along with AI call summary and sentiment analysis. These insights include call classification/call disposition and extracting crucial information such as products discussed, next actions for agents, and pricing details.