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Daily Video API — Add video calls to your app, in minutes.
Now you can add secure, 1-click video calls that work anywhere to your product with just an <iframe> tag. Plus, our API makes building flexible communication workflows easy, with user permissions, chat, recording, and more.
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@hnshah Thanks, Hiten!!! We tried hard to follow your "asking better questions" methodology while designing/building/beta-testing this API.
https://hitenism.com/startup-que...
Lots of really innovative video startups of late and this looks like another. Congrats on the launch!
It's been an honor to be apart of this team and help work through our API launch! As the Design Lead for Daily.co I just wanted to echo a few key points that @ninacali4 mentioned above:
1. API calls are UI-ready and work out of the box. Camera/mic controls, responsive layouts, and more all just work. Test out our demo, here: https://daily.co/api/demo
2. Video calls generated with the API work across browsers. That means that Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge (desktop); and iOS Safari and Android Chrome (mobile) are supported.
3. Our API is free to get started 😍
We are very receptive to any feedback, and selfishly, any notes on our UX! Feel free to ask me any questions about our design language and philosophy, here.
I really like the fact no install, no signup is required for recipients. That's extremely valuable imo.
Would love to use the APIs in our product, but wondering about your pricing model.
1. Why is the standard product (Browser calls) free for up to 50 people in a call, but APIs are free only for 2 people? And even first tier is limited to only 4 people in a call. Higher number of callers would make the product more appealing as anyway the pricing is then determined by number of minutes, i.e. users in a call by minutes spent in the call... Removing limitation on users per call will simplify pricing and actually improve conversion to higher plans for you, imo (the more users in a call, the better it is for you)
2. What is a room in the context of APIs? Do I need one room per end-user, so max 5 or 1000 different calls per mo? Or are they concurrent or something else?
3. Lastly, not clear what does it mean "starting at". Let's say with $49 plan, I assume we get 10,000 minutes and we start paying after that. What's the price? Website says "N x Minutes = Cost", so 5 users, 60 minutes = 300... what?
Product is great, just questions on pricing :)
@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).
HUGE fan of this product -- it sounds so cliche but I literally use it daily. Love it.
We've been using Daily for about 2 years now at Mux, for all of our meetings, and it's been a great experience. I'm really interested to see what people do with access the API now.
Congratulation guys! Keep the great work. In Standuply, we already integrated your API to support face-to-face standup meetings. Now, we plan to extend using your awesome API to our new functionality - https://experts.standuply.com. Thank you a lot for the service:)
@artem_borodin Thanks! Standuply is excellent - really pleased the API is useful to you guys.
@nina does this just give you a CTA button to add to my app and once a user clicks it, it starts the video call using the users native functionality?
Hi @marius_chawa, the API lets you embed a video call into the interface of your app using an . So all the video feeds appear inside your app, wherever you position/size the iframe. Of course, you can also open a new browser window/tab for the video call, if you prefer.
We're at Standuply.com are using Daily.co services for almost a year and our NPS is 10/10.
Pros:Daily.co is an awesome service which is easy to implement and that works out of the box.
Cons:nope
Hey everyone! Nina from Daily.co here 👋
We love real-time video and our team has been building video calling tools since back when you had to custom encode video for the chipset in the Nokia 6600.
We founded our startup, Daily.co, as a bet that WebRTC — the web standard for real-time audio, video, and data — would take over the world, and that's definitely happening. (Stay tuned for Google's big, not-so-secret, future of game-streaming announcement, at GDC next week.)
We launched WebRTC-based hardware for video calls and always-on portals in 2016. In 2017 we opened up the software that powers our hardware to offer free, basic browser calls, with lots of features (recording, dial-in, dual screen-sharing, etc). That was originally limited to just Chrome. Last year we added support for Firefox, Safari, Edge, iOS, and Android.
Today we're publicly launching our API 💥 😀 🛠
We want it to be super-easy to add video calls to any website or app. Remote work gets more and more popular, and users need tools that let them live and work, and use tools from anywhere. Things like:
- Teaching, coaching, and mentoring
- Customer support video calls, with automatic recording
- Quick, synchronous collaboration on documents
- Team and project management
- Healthcare
- Having fun together
The easier it is to embed video calls into your product and to build custom video call workflows, the more cool things people will do with video.
You can start prototyping with a single .
– Here's a quick-start tutorial, https://www.daily.co/blog/embedd...
– And here are the full developer docs, https://docs.daily.co/reference
We enable millions of video call minutes each month. We want to see what you do with video! We ship new features every week. Tell us what you'd like to see in the platform.
Thanks!
Hi everyone! Just following up on what @ninacali4 said, above ...
We've got a limited time Product Hunt deal, for all of you.
If you upgrade to a paid API plan within the next week, your first month is free. Upgrade, then ping us and tell us you came from PH. We'll immediately refund the first month's subscription charge.
@svirelkas Thanks, the visual aspect of To Round is awesome. We'd love to hear what you're thinking about. Let us know if you have any feedback ;)
WOW!!! This is really great product! I like the part where it says no credit card required to start 😅 Keep it up guys!!
This is cool! Could you share a bit about the differences about your service compared to more "established" services that provide video call APIs? (e.g. Twilio).
Minor comments: Signin with Google didn't seem to work on landing page; Intercom was not responsive, i.e., messages not being sent (not sure if this is an issue on your end); It'd be nice to have the "$0.004/minute after 10,000 minutes" in the main https://www.daily.co/api/pricing page. I had to actually login and go to my dashboard to figure this info out.
@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...
We are using the product for more than 6 months
Pros:Excellent product and API. Works great. The team always helped me with my doubts, difficulties and suggestions. Highly recommend!
Cons:no
We started using Daily.co about 6-8 months ago after researching half a dozen alternatives that all cost too much money and were too complicated to use. We love it!
Pros:It literally is just one click to use. Adding it to our own startup's website has meant an instant massive upgrade to our functionality.
Cons:I know that things with mobile are improving all the time so we can be patient :-)
We've actually searched far and wide for a conferencing solution for our product and compared several products in this space. Daily.co kept coming up on top!
Pros:It was extremely easy to integrate Daily.co's API into our own product. It has everything that we need, it's fast, it's easy.
Cons:None.
Big fan of Daily! We've been using it for our livestreaming player and the quality is top notch, the customer support is always here to answer any questions. Very interesting features being shipped and top team & company culture, bravo @kwindla & co!
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