How Chitti Records 18,000+ Hours of Classes Monthly with Attendee
"The ability to self-host Attendee was a game-changer. We pay just $1500 per month to run our Attendee instance, 90% less than what Recall costs."
Summary
The Challenge: Recording at Scale Without Breaking the Budget
For Chitti, a platform that educates children across India on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) through online classes on Google Meet, maintaining instruction quality at scale is a constant challenge.
"We're conducting tens of thousands of classes every month. Recording these classes is essential for maintaining our teaching standards. Our learning quality assurance team reviews these recordings to evaluate instructor performance and ensure every child receives the high-quality education they deserve."
Using Google Meet's built-in recording functionality had major problems. Teachers would have to remember to manually activate the recording and there was no way to record in Gallery View, which is essential for capturing student reactions.
Instead, Chitti turned to Meeting Bots as a way to obtain the recordings automatically and get both a gallery view and speaker view recording of each class. However, under the per-hour pricing offered by cloud-based Meeting Bot APIs like Recall.ai, recording these classes would cost over $200,000 annually. "For an education company focused on making learning accessible, that simply wasn't sustainable," Samro explains.
This challenge led Chitti to seek a Meeting Bot solution with a more scalable pricing model.
The Solution: Drastic Savings with a Self-Hosted API
Attendee's self-hosted meeting bot solution offered control, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. By deploying an instance of Attendee on their existing Digital Ocean account, Chitti gained complete ownership of their recording pipeline while sidestepping the high costs of traditional cloud-hosted Meeting Bot APIs.
Pricing that Scales
Chitti pays a fixed monthly cost for Attendee support and for fixed infrastructure such as the Postgres database used by Attendee. Each additional bot costs only $0.07 per hour (a 14x savings compared to Recall), allowing Chitti to grow with confidence. Currently, Chitti pays just $1500 per month to run their Attendee instance.
See below for a cost comparison of Recall vs Attendee as the number of hours recorded grows.
Reliability at Scale
From day one, Attendee's solution proved its stability, recording every class consistently in both gallery and speaker view. "There was some initial concern over how much time we would spend maintaining our Attendee instance, but the software was simple to set up and works well," Samro notes. "We record our classes without worrying about failed bots or our instance going down."
Freeing Up Engineering Resources
By choosing Attendee instead of building in-house, Chitti's engineering team remained focused on its core goal: improving the online learning experience. "Developing this ourselves would have diverted our engineers for months," explains Samro. "With Attendee, we had enterprise-grade recording up and running quickly, letting our team concentrate on what matters most—creating better educational tools for our students."
Using Meeting Bots for AI Instruction
Chitti currently uses Attendee solely for recording classes, but the team is exploring exciting possibilities for the future. "We're particularly excited about using Attendee to host AI teachers for one-on-one follow-up sessions," explains Samro. "Many students hesitate to ask questions during class in front of their peers. AI can enable private sessions after classes to give students the clarification they need without any social pressure."