Start here
Single-course pilot — ₹75,000
Up to 20 hours of your own recordings through the full pipeline, plus an engagement report that measures completion and drop-off on produced modules against unproduced ones in the same cohort. Flat fee, no contract, no platform charge. Most institutions start here.
Essentials
Compliance and accessibility baseline
₹2,000 / finished hour
Under half the going rate for captions alone
Everything a video needs to meet Annexure VI and WCAG 2.1 AA.
- Video Cleanup and Studio Sound
- Word-accurate captions and full transcript
- Logo, background plate, intro and outro
- Title and speaker cards from your course metadata
- Unlimited reviewer seats
Produced
The full pipeline, every effect
₹5,000 / finished hour
60% under the SWAYAM production norm of ₹12,500/hour
What a produced course looks like when nobody had to open an edit timeline.
- Everything in Essentials
- All 16 effects, including Presenter Plus and Animated Lecture
- B-roll included — up to 12 AI cutaways per hour, no credits to track
- Learning objectives, key takeaways and team credits
- Canvas, Moodle and Blackboard integration
Programme licence
A whole programme, committed annually
from ₹4 lakh / year
Sized to your committed hours per term
Less than one SWAYAM-funded course costs to produce — for a whole programme.
- Committed annual hours at a negotiated rate
- Named producer and quarterly production review
- SSO, LMS integration and bulk ingest
- Compliance & Evidence Pack included
- Priority turnaround during your filing window
A finished hour is the runtime of the source recording — a 50-minute lecture is 50 minutes whether you turn on two effects or sixteen, and review re-runs of the same clip never count twice. Essentials and Produced carry a per-term minimum (₹40,000 and ₹1,00,000 respectively — one 20-hour course on either tier) and no other platform fee. Prices are quoted in INR for Indian institutions; USD, GBP and EUR figures (switch above) are the equivalent list price billed outside India — indicative at ₹88 to the dollar, and at prevailing dollar cross-rates for GBP and EUR.
What it costs you today
Measured against the rates you already pay.
Every figure below is published. The SWAYAM norm is the Government of India's own rate for producing an hour of lecture video; the captioning rates are from US university price lists for third-party captioning, converted at ₹88 to the dollar. Those buy captions and nothing else.
Utah State's rate card also carries a $1.00 per minute surcharge for difficult audio — room echo, fan hum, a distant mic. Studio Sound removes that condition before the file is ever sent out, so the surcharge stops applying. Sources: SWAYAM revised payment norms (Dec 2017), Cornell University, Utah State University.
See it by the course
What would a course actually cost?
Set the length of a typical lecture and how many are in the course. The estimate shows your Lecture Studio cost alongside what the same volume of video would cost at the published benchmark rates.
Estimate a course
Your cost
₹1,00,000
Compare tiers
What changes between them.
Essentials covers the effects a regulator or an accessibility audit asks for. Produced adds everything that makes a lecture worth finishing. A Programme licence is the same output with committed volume, a named producer and the compliance pack.
| Pilot | Essentials | Produced | Programme | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | ₹75,000 flat | ₹2,000/hr | ₹5,000/hr | from ₹4 lakh/yr |
| Effects | ||||
| Cleanup, Studio Sound | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Captions and transcript | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Branding, title and speaker cards | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Presenter Plus, Animated Lecture | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI b-roll (included, no credits) | up to 12/hr | — | up to 12/hr | negotiated |
| Learning aids and team credits | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Operations | ||||
| Reviewer seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| LMS integration | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| SSO | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Named producer | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Compliance & Evidence Pack | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Engagement report | ✓ | — | add-on | ✓ |
| Commitment | None | Per term | Per term | Annual |
Questions
Pricing FAQ
What counts as a "finished hour"?
The runtime of the source recording that goes into the pipeline — a 50-minute lecture with two effects applied still counts as roughly 50 minutes, not 100. Trims and re-runs of the same clip during review don't count twice.
Why is Essentials cheaper than captioning on its own?
Because captioning vendors price human transcription per minute and charge more for poor audio. We clean the audio first and caption from the cleaned track, which is both cheaper to run and more accurate — and the same pass can add your branding, cards and transcript at no extra cost. If all you need is Annexure VI and WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, Essentials is the whole job.
Is there still a credit system for AI b-roll?
No. B-roll and animated treatments are included in the Produced rate at up to 12 cutaways per finished hour, which is more than almost any lecture uses. Metering them separately created a budgeting question for a few hundred rupees of compute, so we stopped.
What if we need more b-roll than that?
Tell us and we'll quote it. In practice the cap is well above what a well-paced lecture calls for — beyond roughly one cutaway every five minutes, the cutaways start competing with the teaching rather than supporting it.
Is there a free trial?
There's a free sample rather than a trial: send one recording and we'll return a produced 90-second cut of it within 24 hours, with no call and no commitment. The ₹75,000 single-course pilot is the next step, and it exists to produce a measurement report on your own cohort — not to sell you software.
What's actually in the Compliance & Evidence Pack?
The clause-by-clause mapping to the UGC (ODL Programmes and Online Programmes) Regulations, 2020 shown on our India page, prepared for your Centre for Internal Quality Assurance, plus a per-programme log of which effects were applied to which videos, when, and which faculty member approved each one. It documents how the pipeline addresses Annexures IV, VI and VII. It is not a substitute for your institution's own filing.
Does outsourcing production breach the 60% in-house rule?
No — they cover different things. Regulation 15(C) requires that at least 60% of the e-Learning Material be developed in-house, which is about academic authorship: your faculty write the curriculum, the script and the assessment. Annexure IV·II(iv)(a)(E) separately and explicitly permits the technical work — recording, editing, graphics and animation — to be "outsourced to the centres across the nation having requisite facilities." Lecture Studio is that facility for the video layer. We'll send the one-page note your registrar will want.
How do US and UK institutions usually buy this?
Most start on Essentials against an existing captioning line, because WCAG 2.1 AA conformance under ADA Title II and Section 504 (US) or the 2018 Accessibility Regulations (UK) is already a budgeted obligation with a 2027 deadline. Production is the upgrade conversation once the accessibility work is handled. See the US or UK clause mapping for specifics.
Which tier should we start with?
If a deadline is driving you — a DEB filing or an accessibility audit — start with Essentials. If enrolment and completion are driving you, start with the ₹75,000 pilot on one course and look at the engagement report before committing to anything.
Not sure which tier fits your programme?
Tell us how many courses and how many recording hours a term, and we'll size it around your filing calendar.