Usage, Limits & Video Costs

This page exists so that no bill from us, and no bill caused by us, is ever a surprise. It states what each plan includes, what video actually costs and who you pay for it, and what happens when you reach a limit.

What your plan includes

Courses, tests, live classes, your website, the lead pipeline and staff accounts are not metered at all. There is no charge for page views, admin users, courses or emails sent through your own provider. The storage figure above covers your own library — course images, study materials and resources. Your students' submitted answer sheets and the feedback you return on them are never counted against it.

Video: what it costs and who you pay

You host your own video, on your own account, and pay for it at cost. We do not resell it and we add no markup. You upload, organise and play everything inside VILMS — you will not need to open your video provider's dashboard — but the account, and the bill, are yours.

We are explicit about this because the alternative would be worse for you:

• Video delivery genuinely costs about ₹2.64 per GB streamed. A lecture hour at our default quality is about 0.45 GB, so roughly ₹1 an hour watched.
• A student watching 35 hours a month — normal for serious exam preparation — is about ₹42 per student per month.
• That is several times what the software itself costs. Any platform that tells you video is “included” or “unlimited” is recovering it somewhere: usually as a percentage of your student fees. We take 0% of your fee income, so we cannot and do not fund your bandwidth out of it.

The trade is deliberate. You pay a video provider directly at their published rate, we never mark it up, and your VILMS bill stays flat and predictable no matter how much your students watch. Nothing we bill you can spike because a batch went into revision mode before Prelims.

Keeping your video bill down

• Quality is your choice, per course. 480p is the default because a lecture is a person talking over slides and 480p is genuinely sharp on a phone. 720p costs about 78% more to deliver; 1080p costs several times more and almost no student can tell on a 6-inch screen.
• We show you the number.Delivery is reported by your video provider's own dashboard, since the account is yours. Your VILMS billing page meters the one thing we do host: your library of materials and images.
• We will warn you. If your usage jumps sharply against your own history, we email you. It is not our bill, but you should not be surprised by it.

AI evaluation: what it costs and who you pay

AI evaluation runs on your own Anthropic key, and you pay for it at cost. We add no markup and we do not cap it. You connect the key once under Settings → Connections; the drafting, the marking skills and the mentor-approval step all happen inside VILMS, but the model bill is yours.

It is small. A short typed answer measured at about ₹2; a scanned twenty-page mains paper is nearer ₹50, because the scanned pages dominate what the model reads. Typed answers cost a fraction of handwritten ones.

We used to sell this as an allowance — “500 AI evaluations a year” and so on. That was wrong in both directions: the evaluations were never included, because you were always paying for them, and the cap limited how much of your own money you were allowed to spend. There is no cap now.

Secure Video

Hosting your own video does not mean publishing it to the world. Secure Video — ₹2,900/month on Lite, Starter and Growth, included on Scale and Enterprise — adds short-lived playback links that cannot be shared, a moving watermark carrying each student's own name and number, a limit on how many devices one account can use, and a cap on simultaneous streams.

Said plainly: this makes casual sharing traceable and inconvenient. Nothing prevents someone pointing a phone camera at a screen, and we will not claim otherwise.

When you reach a limit

• Students and storage are the only counted limits. When you reach one we stop the action and offer an upgrade — we never silently bill you for crossing it. AI evaluation is not counted at all: it runs on your own Anthropic key, so there is nothing for us to meter.
• You are warned at 80% and again at 100%, by email to the account owner, and your billing page shows live meters at all times.
• Nothing is switched off. Your site stays up, your classes run and your students keep learning. Reaching a limit never takes your institute offline.
• No retroactive changes.If we change prices or limits we give at least 30 days' notice, effective from your next billing period — never applied to a period you have already used.

Fair use

Use VILMS for your own institute's teaching — not as general file hosting, a public CDN, or a way to resell the platform to others. If your usage looks like one of those rather than teaching, we will talk to you before we do anything else. We suspend without notice only where we must: unlawful content, a security incident, or activity that threatens service for other institutes.

If this does not fit you

If your institute is genuinely different — a very large library, or usage far outside the norm — email billing@vilms.in. We would rather put you on the right arrangement than have you discover a limit the hard way. See also Terms and Refunds.