General Questions
Who is the product for?
The primary use case for the product is for “groups” of individuals who are meeting on a recurring basis and want to keep track of goals from meeting-to-meeting for accountability and record keeping. The meeting history is automatically aggregated along with recording, notes, and chat shared in each meeting. Additionally, there is an organization-wide chat with channels for cross-community collaboration. Our primary customers are professional coaches, facilitators, and educators that want to enhance their member experience and grow their business.
Meeting Minutes
Do meeting guests count again minutes pool?
Yes, when a guest joins your virtual meeting, they consume minutes from the global minutes pool for your organization.
If I use a third-party meeting link, are minutes still consumed?
No, minutes are not consumed
How are meeting minutes calculated?
Each meeting participant consumes 1 minute per minute they’re actively connected to a meeting. E.g., If 2 people run a meeting for 30 minutes, you will consume a total of 60 minutes (2 x 30). You can explore different scenarios by using the meeting calculator on our pricing page.
What service do you use for video?
We currently use Twilio’s Group Rooms for all of our virtual meetings. We may add additional configurations in the future, such as P2P connections.
Does your video use end-to-end (E2E) encryption?
No. At this time we’re only using Group Rooms for connecting individuals on our platform which don’t support E2E encryption. Many video services only provide end-to-end encryption when users are directly connected to each other, which limits the size of the call to 2 or 3 people. If Twilio adds support for E2E encryption to their Group Rooms, we should automatically inherit the update.
What happens if I run out of meeting minutes?
Currently, we’re offering to let users pay for any overage at a rate of $.004 per minute. We may introduce meeting blocks in the future and hope to reduce costs to our customers when we can get the price of video down.
Are meeting minutes pooled or calculated per-user?
Every paid account on nucleus includes a minutes quota. Those minutes are added into a pool for the organization. E.g., if you have two paid users on the Plus plan, your organization has a total of 2000 minutes per month in the pool. Let’s say user A meets for a total of 1200 minutes and user B meets for a total of 800 minutes. Your total minutes consumed for the month would be 1800 which is less than 2000, so you would not incur any overages.
Why do you limit meeting minutes?
Meeting minutes come at a high cost to our organization since we’re using enterprise-quality video provided by Twilio. Many companies choose to use open-source, self-hosted alternatives to reduce costs. We’ve used similar solutions in the past and we’re not pleased with the quality of the video (neither were our customers!). Those solutions sometimes work well up to 3 or 4 participants but start to really drop-off in quality at around 5 or 6+. Twilio Group Rooms support up to 50 active participants. We have many groups running 12 and 15 person masterminds and are happy with the quality of the video. In addition, we have users all over the globe, and without Twilio’s infrastructure, it would be very difficult to provide a consistent quality of service.