Medallia Experience Cloud is the core platform in the Medallia portfolio. Medallia describes it as an end-to-end experience platform that collects responses from multiple signals, processes them, and reports individual and aggregated responses that are then used to drive accountability and action.[3] Its commercial model is unusual among survey and feedback tools. Rather than charging by survey response volume or by the number of users, Medallia states that its pricing is built on one concept, the Experience Data Record (EDR).[1]
This article explains what Medallia says an EDR is, what the EDR price is stated to include, how the platform’s record lifecycle relates to the unit, and which API allowances and hosting restrictions accompany a subscription.
Editions
Medallia publishes no edition ladder for Experience Cloud. The pricing page presents a single platform and says the single metric includes the following: comprehensive signal capture for employee and customer data, analytics on structured and unstructured data, workflows for closed-loop feedback, role-based reporting, and security and self-service features such as an anti-cheating engine and personally identifiable information (PII) detection and redaction.[1] The platform page groups the same capabilities under capture, analytics, action, administration, integrations and security.[8]
What does vary between customers is the set of capabilities in the Order. Some APIs related to add-on features, such as the Speech API, are available only to customers who have purchased those features.[4] Several adjacent products are also sold separately under their own terms, including Experience Orchestration, Mindful and Concierge. They are covered in separate articles.
Metrics
Experience Data Record
Medallia’s pricing page defines the unit in one sentence: an Experience Data Record “includes all data associated with a discrete interaction between an end-customer (or employee) and a company.”[1] The documentation glossary gives a shorter, system-oriented definition: data stored in Medallia Experience Cloud as a completed record.[2] The two are consistent. The pricing page describes the commercial concept, and the glossary describes what the platform stores. Catalog row: Experience Data Record.
The pricing page adds that EDR pricing applies to customer and employee data coming into Experience Cloud, plus the analytics on that data, the workflows driven by insights, and the security and self-service capabilities.[1] It also states that customers can scale across the business “without being charged separately for each channel” and without separate contracts for different experience programmes.[1]
Relating records to the platform lifecycle
The documentation does not say how to count EDRs for billing. It does explain how records are created, and an asset manager can use that to see which data flows may generate a record. The documentation describes four journeys:[3]
| Journey | How a record is created | Notes from the documentation |
|---|---|---|
| Email-to-web surveys | Invitation data is imported and the Auto Importer creates records; Medallia sends invitations and the response updates the existing record | The response does not create a new record; it adds to the one created at import |
| Web surveys | Invitation data is imported and survey links are generated, but another system delivers the invitation | The record is created at import and later marked completed on response |
| Product signals | A Medallia product such as Digital Feedback, Medallia Speech or message-based surveys delivers the survey | A new record is created for each response, and no record exists before the response |
| External signals | Historical or external data is imported, with Auto Importer mode NONE | Records are marked completed on import, with no sampling or survey generation |
The documentation also defines a record as “One unit of data in the platform, such as a survey response, invitation, or interaction,” made up of fields.[10] This is a database term, not necessarily the commercial EDR. For a given contract the Order, not the documentation, governs how the two relate. Two points are worth confirming in writing before a renewal: whether invitations that never receive a response count, and whether historical data imported in bulk counts when it is loaded. The public pages do not answer either question.
API allowance
The second Experience Cloud metric is not priced separately but is a stated limit of the subscription. The documentation says: “All instances of Medallia have an allowance of at least 60,000 API calls per 24-hour window,” and that allowances are based on the Experience Cloud subscription, with higher volumes requested through the account representative.[4] Catalog row: Experience Cloud API allowance.
Counting / floors
EDR tiers
The pricing page states that the EDR model is “priced in annual tiers.”[1] A tier is therefore an annual volume band. The public documents do not give band sizes, the price per band, what happens when a customer moves above its band mid-year, or whether unused volume carries over. Medallia’s Master Subscription Agreement provides the general rule: if a customer exceeds the usage provided in an Order, Medallia will either work with the customer to execute an Order for the excess usage or curtail access.[9] Fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable except as the agreement explicitly states.[9] Catalog row: EDR annual tier pricing.
API limits
The platform enforces per-API throttles that an integration team should size against. The documented limits are:[4]
| API | Requests per second | Requests per minute | Requests per day | Concurrent requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Query API | 70 | n/a | 975,000 | n/a |
| Speech API | n/a | 13,000 | 325,000 | 1,000 |
| Users API and Roles API | 70 | n/a | 10,000 | n/a |
| Import API, concurrent mode | 1 | n/a | 1,950,000 | 5 |
| Import API, non-concurrent mode | 10 | n/a | 1,950,000 | n/a |
| Feed File API: Results | 10 | n/a | 100,000 | n/a |
When these limits are exceeded, the app or user may be throttled and its requests fail; the documentation shows a 429 Too Many Requests response for calls above the per-second allowance.[4] Medallia says it limits calls per company to prevent unintended bugs or malicious code from taking down production systems.[4]
The Query API also has a cost limit. Requests are throttled once the 3,000,000 cost units per query limit is reached, and the cost is driven mainly by page size and the number of fields requested.[5] The documentation advises against using the Query API in front-end implementations that request data on page load, such as showing an NPS score on a brand website, and recommends storing the value through a back-end integration.[4] This matters for licensing because an integration that polls the API for each web visitor could be throttled.
The Speech API supports bulk uploads of up to 1,000 records per request, with up to 13,000 requests per minute and 325,000 requests per 24-hour period.[6] Catalog evidence is recorded for each limit.
Virtualization & partitioning
Experience Cloud is a Medallia-hosted service, and the documentation describes multiple environments such as production and sandbox instances. The rate-limit examples treat a production instance and a sandbox as separate for limit purposes: ten calls per second to the Users API on production and ten on a sandbox both return 200 OK.[4] The sources do not say whether sandbox records count toward EDR tiers. Confirm sandbox treatment in the Order.
Cloud / BYOL
There is no bring-your-own-licence model. Hosting is the relevant variable. Medallia GovCloud is a FedRAMP High authorized platform on which many products and features are certified to run. The GovCloud list covers Experience Cloud, Conversations and Digital Feedback, shows Medallia Speech as available but without sandbox support or connectors, and marks Video, Agile Research, Digital Experience Analytics, Journey Analytics, Agent Connect, Strikedeck and Concierge as not available.[7] GovCloud instances that use Medallia’s Trusted Internet Connection premium offering must implement an API gateway for rate limiting.[4] Catalog row: Medallia GovCloud.
Programs
EDR annual tier pricing is the only named programme for Experience Cloud. Medallia states that the tiers are meant to support planning and “eliminate unwelcome surprises.”[1] Contract mechanics such as term, renewal and termination sit in the Order and the Master Subscription Agreement. The master terms give customers under an Order Form at least 30 days to download their data in a standard flat file format after termination, followed by deletion of Customer Data within 60 days.[9]
Out of scope
- Tier sizes and price. Not published.
- How EDRs are counted for invoicing. The public pages define the unit but not the counting procedure, so it is not catalogued beyond the definition.
- Add-on products. Experience Orchestration, Mindful, Agile Research, Digital Experience Analytics and Concierge are separate articles.
- Security certifications and data residency. Out of scope for licensing.