The gap
A siren says something is wrong. It does not say what to do.
Outdoor warning sirens carry a tone. Reverse-911 reaches the numbers on file. Text alerts fit in 360 characters. Social media reaches whoever the feed decides to show. Each of these does one narrow job, and none of them can carry a human voice explaining, at length and as the situation changes, what a resident should actually do right now.
Add a second problem on top: a meaningful share of the people who most need those instructions do not receive them in a language they can act on quickly.
Sirens
A tone with no content. Indoors, in bad weather, or with headphones on, frequently unheard at all.
Text and reverse-911
Short, one-directional, and limited to contact records that are often stale or absent for renters and cell-only households.
Public address
Bounded by the property line and by whatever the ambient noise happens to be. One language at a time.
The instruction is the whole point.
Not that something happened — what to do, where to go, when it is over, and who to call. That takes a voice, and it takes minutes, not characters.
Language access
One speaker. Every language in the room.
Your public information officer speaks normally into a phone or a desk microphone. Residents open a link and choose the language they want to hear. Translation happens live, as the words are spoken — there is no separate broadcast to staff, no interpreter to schedule, and no second version of the message to keep in sync with the first.
The same channel serves a council meeting, a boil-water notice, a shelter-in-place order and a Fourth of July concert. It is the delivery layer, not a single-purpose alerting product.
- English
- Español
- Français
- Português
- Deutsch
- Italiano
- 简体中文
- 日本語
- 한국어
- हिन्दी
This is the actual list, not an illustration. English is the spoken source language; the nine above it are what the translation currently produces. The set is defined by the underlying translation service and can change, so re-check it before it goes in a procurement document.
Read the list against your own LEP profile before anything else. Many of the languages a US jurisdiction most often needs — among them Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Russian, Haitian Creole, Somali and Hmong — are not on it. If the languages your residents actually speak are missing, CommunityCast does not reach those households, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise. That gap is a reason to keep your existing interpretation arrangements, not to replace them.
Read this before citing compliance
Language access under Title VI, and effective-communication obligations under the ADA, are legal standards that depend on your jurisdiction, your population, your programs and your own written plan. CommunityCast can be one component of how an agency meets those obligations — it is not, on its own, a determination that you have met them.
We do not make compliance claims on your behalf and you should not repeat any to your council or board on the strength of this page. Have your counsel and your ADA/Title VI coordinator evaluate it against your language access plan before it goes in a procurement document.
Operation
Standing up a channel
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Create the channel
Set it up once. It stays available — a standing public channel for the jurisdiction, not something assembled during an incident when nobody has time to assemble anything.
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Publish the link
One URL and a QR code. It goes on the city website, on printed notices, on the back of utility bills, on signage at the EOC and at shelter sites, and into your existing alert templates. Residents open it in the browser they already have — there is nothing to install and no account to create.
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Speak
Anyone you have authorised can go live from a phone or a laptop. Residents hear it in the language they selected. Add designated speakers — a fire PIO, a translator, a department head — without changing the link the public already has.
Where it is used
Not only for emergencies
A channel that only gets used during a disaster is a channel nobody has open during a disaster. Routine use is what makes it work when it matters.
Emergency operations
Shelter-in-place, evacuation routing, boil-water notices, storm updates, all-clear. Continuous voice rather than one-shot alerts.
Public meetings
Council, commission and board meetings — heard clearly from the back row, from the overflow room, and from home, in the resident's own language.
Hearings and open houses
Rezoning, capital projects, budget hearings. Rooms where the acoustics are poor and the turnout is exactly the population you were required to reach.
Drills and exercises
Run the channel during tabletop and full-scale exercises so staff and residents both know what it sounds like before an incident.
Accessibility
Residents listen on their own phone through their own earbuds or hearing devices, at their own volume — no shared receiver to sign out, sanitise and return.
Community events
Parades, ceremonies, fireworks, outdoor concerts. Coverage that does not stop at the edge of the speaker throw or violate a noise ordinance.
Practical questions
What it needs and what it does not
| Requirement | CommunityCast |
|---|---|
| Hardware to purchase | None required. A phone or laptop with a microphone is sufficient; a desk or lapel mic improves quality. |
| Resident-side equipment | Their own smartphone. |
| App install | None. Opens in a browser from a link or QR code. |
| FCC licence | Not applicable — this is an internet stream, not a radio transmission. |
| Coverage area | Anywhere the resident has cellular or Wi-Fi data. Not bounded by transmitter range or property line. |
| Dependency | Requires working data service. It complements sirens and Wireless Emergency Alerts — it does not replace them, and should not be your only channel. |
| Translation | Live, per-listener language selection. Confirm current language coverage against your LEP profile. |
| Capacity | Scales with listeners rather than with hardware inventory. |
That data-service dependency is a real constraint and we would rather you hear it from us than discover it during an incident. Any responsible communications plan runs multiple independent channels; CommunityCast is intended to be the one that carries detail and language, alongside the ones that carry reach when infrastructure is degraded.
Budget
What it would cost your jurisdiction
Move the sliders to your own numbers. This is arithmetic on BYOPA’s published rates, not a quote.
a year on Pro ($1,428) plus $0 in token top-ups — more than one channel at once requires Pro
At those settings each incident runs 3,750 people listening across 3 channels in 2 languages, which burns 0 tokens an hour — 0 per incident and 0 across the year. Your plan already includes 0, leaving nothing to buy in token packs.
Past what a slider should answer. A jurisdiction larger than this, an activation running for days, or anything heading into a procurement process is quoted rather than metered — the per-listener rate that drives this calculator is not the right instrument at that size. Email sales@byopa.us with your real population and activation pattern and we will work it through properly.
You may not need as many channels as you think. A channel is a separate simultaneous stream, and running more than one requires Pro. But several agencies can share a single channel and simply take the microphone in turn — police, fire and public works all speaking on the one stream, each from their own phone or desk. Separate channels are for when residents genuinely need to choose between two things being said at the same time, such as an evacuation route running alongside a shelter-in-place instruction. If the messages are sequential rather than simultaneous, one channel does it, and a small jurisdiction can stay on Starter.
Every rate here is BYOPA’s published one: plans at the annual price ($39/mo Starter, $119/mo Pro), the per-hour token rates for channels, translation, moderation, chat, questions, Krisp noise suppression and audio playback, and the per-listener rate that dominates everything else once an audience is large. Assumes one voice per channel and never fewer than two on the mic. The included token allowance is monthly and does not roll over, so activations clustered into one month can need top-ups even when the yearly total looks covered — and an emergency does not schedule itself evenly. The share-listening figure is the one nobody can hand you in advance; treat 12% as a placeholder to change, not a benchmark we have data for. Rates and plan prices can change.
Set up a channel for your jurisdiction
Free to try. Stand one up, run it in your next exercise, and see how it behaves before it is ever needed in earnest. Starting an account costs nothing and a trial can take channels live; keeping them live after the trial needs a plan.