05 Recording and Transcripts
One hour of 1080p is 600 MB.
Cloud meeting recording with transcripts, for teams who need the call back afterwards and need to know what keeping it will cost. Record video, audio and the screen share, get a searchable transcript, and set retention per workspace between 7 and 365 days. Storage is the whole bill, and the arithmetic is on this page.
What it costs
You pay for what you keep.
Recording is billed per GB of retained storage, per month. Not per recording, not per host, not per hour recorded. If a file is deleted on day 31 under a 30-day policy, it stops costing you anything in the next cycle.
That makes retention the single lever on this bill. A team recording 40 hours a month at 1080p and keeping everything for a year carries about 288 GB. The same team at 720p with a 30-day policy carries about 12 GB. Same meetings, same people, a bill twenty-four times smaller. Transcripts are included in the storage figure and add well under a megabyte per hour.
- Price basis
- Per GB of retained storage, per month
- 1080p hour
- ≈ 600 MB
- 720p hour
- ≈ 300 MB
- Audio-only hour
- ≈ 30 MB
- Default retention
- 30 days, changeable to 7, 90 or 365
- Transcript
- Included with every recording. Editable, exportable as text or WebVTT.
The storage arithmetic
Hours per month, times size, times retention.
Recordings are kept for 30 days unless you change it. One hour of 1080p is roughly 600 MB. Everything below follows from those two numbers, and you can check it with a calculator.
| Monthly hours | Quality | 7 days | 30 days | 90 days | 365 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 hours | 1080p | 1.4 GB | 6 GB | 18 GB | 72 GB |
| 10 hours | 720p | 0.7 GB | 3 GB | 9 GB | 36 GB |
| 40 hours | 1080p | 5.6 GB | 24 GB | 72 GB | 288 GB |
| 40 hours | 720p | 2.8 GB | 12 GB | 36 GB | 144 GB |
| 120 hours | 1080p | 17 GB | 72 GB | 216 GB | 864 GB |
| 120 hours | Audio only | 0.8 GB | 3.6 GB | 11 GB | 43 GB |
A 30-day row is one month of recordings held at once, because each file is deleted as the next month's arrives. A 365-day row is twelve months held at once. The 7-day column is a quarter of a month, which is why it looks small: it is.
Two things bend these numbers in your favour. A recording of a screen share with mostly static content compresses far below 600 MB an hour, often closer to 250 MB, because the encoder has little to do. And an audio-only recording of a long internal standup is 30 MB an hour, which is almost free to keep for a year.
One thing bends them against you: recording every meeting by default. Most workspaces that do it end up keeping hundreds of hours nobody ever opens. Record the calls that will be watched again, which in practice means training sessions, client reviews and anything where a decision is made with money attached.
What you get back
The recording, and a way to find things in it.
What gets captured
Active speaker video, the screen share if there was one, and the mixed audio of everyone in the call including people who joined by phone dial-in. Gallery view is recorded as a separate track when the host asks for it, which roughly doubles the file size, so it is off by default.
The meeting chat from the call is saved as a text file beside the recording. Whiteboard boards are not inside the video file; they live on in the workspace as editable boards.
Transcripts
Every recording gets a transcript with speaker labels and timestamps. Click a line and playback jumps to it. Search across all recordings in the workspace returns transcript hits, not just file names, which is the only way anyone has ever found the one sentence they needed from a meeting six weeks ago.
Accuracy is honest rather than impressive: good on a headset in a quiet room, weaker on a speakerphone with four people in it, weaker again on a PSTN leg sampled at 8 kHz. Transcripts are editable and the correction sticks, including in search.
Who can open it
By default the host and the people who were invited to the meeting. A host can narrow that to themselves or widen it to a channel. An admin can set a workspace rule that recordings are never shareable by public link, which stops the usual accident of a client review ending up on a link someone forwarded.
Every view and every download is written to the audit log in the admin console, with the name, the file and the time.
Retention and deletion
Retention is a workspace setting: 7, 30, 90 or 365 days. Deletion at the end of the window is automatic and permanent, and it takes the transcript and the chat file with it. A host can delete sooner. Nobody can extend a single file past the workspace policy, which is deliberate: an exception that lives on one file is an exception nobody remembers at audit time.
If you need a recording kept beyond the policy, download it and keep it in your own system. We will tell you the same thing on the phone.
Consent indicator
The recording indicator sits in the toolbar from the first frame to the last and cannot be hidden by the host. People joining by phone hear a spoken announcement. Anyone who joins mid-call sees the indicator before their camera turns on. Recording law varies by state and by country and is your responsibility, not ours. What we control is the indicator, and nobody in the call can miss it.
What we refuse
No attention scoring.
We do not score who looked away from the camera. That feature does not exist here and will not. A recording is a record of what was said, not a performance review of who was paying attention while it was said.
There is also no sentiment analysis of the transcript, no talk-time leaderboard presented to managers, and no automatic flagging of keywords for compliance. Teams ask for the last one occasionally. The honest answer is that a keyword flag on a meeting transcript produces false positives at a rate that makes the feature worse than useless, and we would rather not sell it than sell it with a disclaimer.
What the admin console does report is storage: GB held, hours recorded, the ten largest files. That is the number that costs you money, so that is the number we surface.
A recording is a record of what was said. Nothing more.
Before you ask
Questions about recording.
How much storage does an hour take?
Roughly 600 MB for an hour of 1080p, 300 MB for 720p and about 30 MB for audio only. A screen share of static material comes in lower because little of the frame changes.
How long are recordings kept?
Recordings are kept for 30 days unless you change it. Retention is set per workspace at 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, and deletion at the end of the window is automatic and permanent.
Does everyone know the meeting is being recorded?
Yes. The indicator sits in the toolbar for the whole call and cannot be hidden by the host, and a spoken announcement plays for people who joined by phone.
Can we store recordings in our own bucket?
Automatic export to your own object storage after a recording finishes is available on request and quoted in the proposal. The retention policy then applies to our copy, and what happens in your bucket is yours to manage.
Who should skip this module?
Teams whose meetings are short internal standups. You will record 60 hours a month, watch none of it and pay to keep it. Use video messages for the updates people actually replay, and record only the sessions worth watching twice.
Ask for a proposal
Hours and retention.
Tell us roughly how many hours a month you expect to record, at what quality, and how long compliance says you must keep them. We send back the storage figure and the price against it.