The team behind BeyondATC has announced via a Discord post and YouTube video that it is adjusting the pricing model on the much anticipated AI ATC tool after it received feedback from simmers who complained about its cost and complexity.
Big Price Cut and New Features
BeyondATC’s new base price will be $29.99 USD and will include the basic voice model and push-to-talk for unlimited use at no additional cost. This basic voice model has hundreds of “medium” quality voices and includes many accents for different regions around the world.
For comparison, the old pricing model had the base price of the program set at $59.99. For this price, you received the low-quality offline voices, along with some “Transmission Time” for the medium-quality basic voices and the premium voices. The basic voices will now be included with the program and will no longer require transmission time.
Premium Characters and Removal of Transmission Time
In the YouTube video of the announcement, Captain explained that the Transmission Time concept was created for users to be able to pay for the cost of using all the different technologies included in BeyondATC with a single resource that didn’t require a monthly subscription. The result was a system that simmers complained was arbitrary and confusing.
Thanks to some negotiations with its service providers, BeyondATC was able to reduce the cost of using the technologies to the point where they could reduce the price of the product, include the basic voices with the base package, and implement a new pricing system for the premium voices that is simpler to understand.
The new Premium Characters, as the name implies, derive their cost from the number of characters used. For example, a sentence like “FSNews 123, Cleared for Takeoff.” has 28 characters, so the cost in BeyondATC for this sentence would be 28 Premium Characters.
Premium Characters are only required to use the premium voices, which are high-quality voices made using hundreds of recordings of real people and include accents for every country. The premium voices even include the guest voices of a few flight sim YouTubers such as Overkill Simulations, EasyJetSimPilot, and CivRyan.
BeyondATC Beta Status and Release
As the team enters its third week of beta, Captain reports that it is going well, with the testers enjoying the use of the program and catching many bugs that the team has fixed. Soon, the team intends to move on to traffic testing for some time, after which it will be looking to release the product.
You can view the announcement video on YouTube here or check the announcement post in BATC’s Discord here. If you would like to know more about the old pricing model and about BeyondATC in general, you can check out our previous article here.
