If you work in live production, we’ve heard the feeling goes something like this:

You build a show, festival, rodeo, circus of delights. You juggle creative ambition, crew schedules, venue realities, talent, travel, risk, router failures, and a budget. Then captioning comes up, often later than it should, and the conversation turns to pricing models that feel like they were designed for software, not for real life.

Over the last year, we have heard a version of the same frustration from more than one client. Prices have risen, but the product/service they are escaping does not feel meaningfully different.

That is a hard thing to say out loud, because no one wants to imply that captions are optional or that value equals flashy features. But it is a legitimate commercial concern. If costs go up, customers deserve to understand why, and they deserve to see where that extra cost shows up in reliability, support, quality, or outcomes.

Visible Values

Sometimes costs rise for reasons that are real and understandable. Labour markets, demand spikes, language rarity. Production schedules get tighter, and service needs more coordination. Price increases without visible value breed resentment via a feeling of detached reality.

When a platform charges more, but workflows feel unchanged. When the UI looks the same, the integrations still require workarounds, and the support experience is identical. When the customer is told it is “the market” without any clarity on what they are actually paying for. And when you're chained to the same technology for the last 20 years with no delay improvements, the window dressing starts to wilt.

In live environments, you can feel the difference between a supplier who is investing in the service and one who is extracting value from the contract.

Lock-in or Loyalty?

There is another layer to this conversation, on whether you are a hostage-taker or hero to your clients.

Some companies have built strong positions by owning the ecosystem around encoding, packaging, and distribution. That can create a gravity well. Once you are in, everything is connected. Players, encoders, caption formats, delivery endpoints, monitoring tools, even how you publish and archive.

That can be convenient. It can also become a trap.

Because when one part of the ecosystem is tied to everything else, leaving is no longer a simple procurement decision. It becomes a risk.

And that is before you account for the sunk costs of staff training, SOPs, systems integrations and specialists creating a stable solution.

Even if you are unhappy, the safest decision is to stay put. Inertia trumps inspired loyalty.

The Ecosystem Tax

Anyone who has run a live operation understands this instinct. You do not want to introduce instability. You do not want to be the person who changed the workflow and then something breaks on show day.

You keep going with what you have, even if it is expensive, even if it is clunky, even if you are not seeing progress.

The problem is that the longer you stay locked in, the harder it becomes to demand better. The supplier has less incentive to evolve quickly because they already own the space you operate within.

This is the ecosystem tax.

Bespoke Pricing

A single show might need different approaches across its run. At which point, the lock-in subscriptions then swarm with add-ons or bolt-ons or extra-ons and additional skilled mini-ons. (Yes, you read that).

A single event might contain a mission critical keynote which requires human support, four halls in bilingual platform setups with automated captioning, a virtual stream to multiple destinations with single track audio dubbing. That’s all normal - that’s production.

Pricing that forces every event into the same subscription tier ignores this reality. It often leaves teams paying for capacity they do not use, while still being asked to pay extra for the moments that actually matter.

Why we prefer Pay-As-You-Go

At Line 21, we prefer PAYG, because it matches how live captioning is actually delivered.

It lets you scale without penalty. It gives you the freedom to choose the right approach per project rather than forcing everything into a commercial box. It also keeps the relationship honest. If we want your next event, we have to earn it by improving the service, supporting your team, and keeping the delivery dependable.

Lock-in can protect revenue, but will erode your trust.

Tricky tech or human heroes?

There is another part of this that deserves more daylight.

Some pricing models blur the difference between software capability and human-delivered service. A “premium plan” gets framed like it is mostly tech, when the real value may include skilled project management, experienced captioners, QA, and live support.

Those roles matter. They are not an optional extra. In many productions, they are the difference between captions appearing on screen and captions that are accurate, readable, and properly timed.

If a provider is charging more, it should be clear whether you are paying for better technology, better human support, better quality, or all three.

That transparency helps customers budget and helps protect the value of the work.

A healthier industry benefits everyone

This is not a call-out of any single company. It is a pattern. When monopolies and lock-ins dominate, customers struggle to compare options, innovation slows, and price increases are easier to justify without improving outcomes.

A healthier model looks different.

Flexible pricing that reflects real usage. Clear breakdowns of what is included. Service that can adapt to production reality. Easier pathways to switch workflows without disruption.

Most importantly, it puts the focus back where it belongs.

Accessibility is not a subscription product. It is part of how we welcome people into the room.

If you are wrestling with an accessibility brief, comparing pricing models, or trying to work out whether you are paying for technology or for a hidden layer of human effort, we’re always happy to talk it through in plain language.