GRAPHR 4.6 TBat steady state
Teams call queues · storage

What do your call recordings actually cost?

Automatic recording is a switch. The storage is a decision.

Turn on recording for a busy queue and the files land in SharePoint and count against the same quota as everything else. This works out how much, how fast, and how long your included storage lasts. Everything Microsoft publishes is marked; everything it does not publish is yours to enter.

The conversations
Across every queue where recording is switched on.
Recording is enabled per queue, so this is rarely all of them on day one.
Retention is what creates a plateau. Without it the number never stops growing.
Your tenant
Business, Enterprise, Office 365 and SharePoint Plan 1 or 2 licenses earn 1 TB for the organization plus 10 GB each. Microsoft
Frontline plans earn the 1 TB and nothing per user, so a large frontline tenant has far less headroom than its user count suggests.
Everything else already sitting in SharePoint today.
Documents, sites, Teams files, meeting recordings. This is what turns your headroom into a date, and it is the number that decides whether the included storage was ever really free.
400 is Microsoft’s published figure Microsoft — but it describes a meeting recording, which carries video. A queue call is audio, so treat 400 as the ceiling and put your own measured figure in if you have one.
The volume

What the recordings add

391 GB
Added every month
4.6 TB
Held at steady state
78%
Of your included storage

The money

Included is not the same as free

The obvious way to read a storage number is to check whether it fits inside what your licenses already include, and to stop there if it does. That reading is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that costs you money quietly.

Included storage is finite and it is shared. Every gigabyte a recording occupies is a gigabyte that documents, sites and meeting recordings cannot use. If your tenant was ever going to need more storage, recording does not avoid that purchase. It brings it forward. The entitlement decides when the invoice arrives, not whether the cost is real.

So this panel shows three numbers, and the third one is the honest one.

Check yours in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft does not publish this figure on any documentation page. The commonly quoted number is $0.20.
How you read it GB Per year What it means
Cash, at steady state None $0 What you are invoiced for, after the included storage absorbs what it can
Marginal cost 4.6 TB $11,250 Every gigabyte the recordings occupy, priced. The real economic cost of the decision
Same volume at the archive rate of $0.05/GB Microsoft 4.6 TB $2,813 The only per-gigabyte storage price Microsoft publishes, for reference

Both figures annualise the settled volume — the point where retention starts deleting as fast as the queues record. Year one is smaller, and the longer your retention the smaller it is.

The opportunity cost

What recording does to your headroom

Headroom is not a discount. It is a runway, and recording shortens it. These two dates are the same tenant, with and without the queue recordings.

10.0 yr
Until you buy storage, as things are
11 mo
Until you buy storage, with recording on
9.1 yr sooner
Brought forward

The same conversations, three ways

Audio, text, or what you actually learned

Every row below is the same set of calls over your retention period. The only thing that changes is what you decided to keep.

What you keep Size Relative What it answers
The audio 4.6 TB 1× What was said, if somebody listens
The transcript 703 MB 1/6,827 What was said, searchably
The findings 46 MB 1/104,858 What eleven customers said together
Not a Microsoft figure. Roughly 150 spoken words a minute, about 6.5 bytes a word with speaker labels and timings.
A few hundred structured characters per conversation: what they were trying to do, what they had already tried, what they called it.

The findings row is not an argument for deleting anything you might need in a dispute. It is an argument about which of the three you can afford to keep for years, and which one answers a question somebody actually asked.

Where the numbers come from

Sources, and what is missing from them

Free, no account, nothing collected, nothing sent anywhere. Every calculation happens in your browser. If a Microsoft figure has moved since this was built, the link above is the arbiter and I would like to know.

The address bar carries every figure on this page. Send it to whoever has to sign for the storage.