What Sidebard costs

Three plans. The only thing that differs is how much play they include — everything Sidebard does is in all of them.

Which one? Under about five hours a month, Pay as you go is cheapest. Between five and twenty, Table. Over twenty, Campaign. You can move between them whenever you like, and the change takes effect the moment you make it. Hours you have already played this month stay billed at the plan you played them on.

A spending limit, if you want one

On Pay as you go there are no hours to run out of, and on every plan extra hours can keep the microphone going past what is included. You can put a monthly spending limit on that, on any plan: at the limit the microphone stops and everything else keeps working, and it starts again when the month does. There is no limit unless you set one. Instead, we email you when a month's extra hours reach $25, and again at $50, so nothing arrives as a surprise.

Extra hours are never sold in advance. They are counted by the minute and added to your next monthly invoice, so there is one charge a month, whatever you play.

If a month on Pay as you go costs you $20 by the hour, Campaign — $20 with twenty-five hours in it — is simply a better deal, and we would rather say so than quietly take the money.

What counts as an hour

We only count time we can hear the table. Sidebard stops listening through the quiet stretches on its own — the shuffle between scenes, the pizza arriving, the argument about the map — so a sixty-minute hour of real play usually bills about forty minutes.

That is deliberate, and it is the reason to say it out loud: a DM who mutes the microphone to save money has broken the thing they are paying for. You should never have to think about the meter while you are running a game, so nothing about hours or cost appears on the play screen — no counter, no reminders, nothing. Sidebard says one thing about hours, and only when the hours are gone: the microphone stops, and it tells you then. The running figure lives in Settings and on your account page, for the moments you actually want it.

Only the microphone uses hours. Maps, portraits, rules lookups, encounter building and story help do not, and they keep working when the hours run out.

Hours you don't use roll over

Anything left at the end of a month carries into the next one, up to one month's worth of your plan — so on Table you can be holding twenty hours, and on Campaign fifty. A month you barely played is not a month you wasted, and a quiet January pays for a busy February.

Pay as you go includes no hours, so it has none to carry: a month you do not play costs you $2 and nothing else.

If you run out

Nothing is charged to you by surprise. When the hours are gone the microphone stops and everything else carries on, and you choose what to do about it:

• Move up a plan. Immediate: your included hours become the new plan's, less what you have already used this month, and the money is worked out for the rest of the month. Hours you have already used are billed at the rate you agreed to on the plan you used them on, and are never charged again on the new one.
• Turn on extra hours. Off unless you ask for it. With it on, hours past your plan's are added to your next payment at your plan's rate, and you can turn it off again at any time.

Extra hours are opt-in, always. We would rather the microphone stopped and you decided than bill you for something you did not ask for. On Pay as you go there is nothing to opt into and nothing to ask: being billed by the hour is the plan, which is why that one has a spending limit instead.

The rest of it

Download Sidebard Questions?