Acoustic Pipeline Pricing
You can choose from a range of different plans:
- Free plan – process up to 100 GB
- Pay-as-you-go – buy additional credits as and when you need to scale up
- Bespoke Projects – pricing from £573
Regardless of which plan you choose, sharing your recordings and results with the Pipeline helps us to improve the classifiers, but you can opt out.
Using the Pipeline for free
Every Acoustic Pipeline user receives 100 free credits per year to use for audio processing. You can buy additional credits at any time on a pay-as-you-go basis.
- For audible sound recordings e.g. birds, processing is free if the results are shared with the Pipeline.
- For ultrasonic recordings e.g. bats, the 100 free credits can be used to process ultrasonic audio data at a rate of 1 GB per credit, if the results are shared with the Pipeline. As a rule of thumb, 1 night of triggered ultrasonic recordings averages 2 GB of data.
- Audible and ultrasonic recordings that cannot be shared with the Pipeline can be processed at a rate of 7 credits per GB.
Read more about sharing your recordings and results and opting out >
100 free credits
to process up to
100 GB
of recordings
Buy additional credits at any time on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Pay as you go
After the first 100 free credits have been used, additional credits can be purchased at any time on a scalable pay-as-you-go basis from the Acoustic Pipeline web application in bundles of:
- 250 credits – £50
- 500 credits – £100
- 1000 credits – £200
- 5000 credits – £1000
All prices shown here exclude VAT, but VAT will be added at the point of purchase.
Bespoke Acoustic Pipeline Projects
We also offer a bespoke service called Acoustic Pipeline Projects which is ideal for large-scale or commercial use.
An Acoustic Pipeline Project can:
- Help you manage multiple acoustic projects for different clients with independent workflows.
- Provide a centrally processed dataset for projects covering large sites with multiple fieldworkers.
- Coordinate uploading, storing and processing citizen science data.
- Prices begin from £573.
The value of sharing your recordings and results
When you use the Acoustic Pipeline, two potentially valuable resources are generated:
- Recordings – the audio data comprising recordings of species of interest
- Results – the distribution records arising from the recordings.
Your recordings and results are always stored safely in our secure servers. Unless you choose to opt out, these data are also shared with the Pipeline:
- Shared Recordings to verify the automated species identities produced by the Pipeline and to improve classifier performance.
- Shared Results may be used in large-scale analyses of patterns and processes.
- Shared Recordings and Shared Results may be passed to third parties for the purposes of verification, processing and further analysis.
We will never provide your personal details to third parties without your permission.
For more details, see our Terms and Conditions.
Opting out of data sharing
We know it isn’t always possible to share data, so you can use the Pipeline without sharing your results and recordings with us, or our approved third parties.
However, we need to levy a service charge for opting out. This helps keep the overall running costs down and therefore more affordable for conservation uses, especially in the NGO sector.
How much does it cost to process data without sharing recordings and results?
If you are not able to share your recordings and results, processing of both acoustic and ultrasonic recordings is charged at 7 credits per GB.
Credits will be deducted from the user’s free allocation until these run out. Thereafter, users can purchase additional bundles of credits.
This type of processing works out at £1.40 per GB of audio.
Get in touch
Interested in a Pipeline Project?
We’d love to hear from you.
You can reach us at
acoustic.pipeline [at] bto.org
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