Zinn Calls are live video and audio calls that run inside Zinn Hub, so you can meet a freelancer face to face without ever leaving the platform. Nothing to install, no meeting links to swap, no phone numbers or email addresses shared. And if you and the Zinner don't speak the same language, Zinn Hub can translate the conversation live — as captions on your screen, or as a spoken voice in your ear.
This guide covers everything a buyer needs: booking a call, what happens when there's a language gap, what it costs, and how to reschedule, add a teammate, or find your recording afterwards.
In this article
- What a Zinn Call is
- Where you find your calls
- The four ways you'll end up on a call
- Setting your call languages
- The language check: shared language, or a gap
- Captions or spoken voice — which to choose
- Call Credits: what they are and who pays
- Joining your call
- Bringing a teammate along
- Rescheduling, cancelling and reminders
- Recordings and call history
- Common questions
1. What a Zinn Call is
A Zinn Call is a live video or audio session between you and a Zinner (a freelancer on Zinn Hub). It runs in your web browser on any device — desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. Camera, microphone and screen-sharing all work, and the whole thing happens on Zinn Hub, tied to your order.
Zinners use calls to deliver all sorts of work: coaching sessions, tutoring, language lessons, fitness training, business consulting, design reviews, code walkthroughs, CV feedback, mentoring — anything better done face to face than over messages.
The call itself is always free. Video, audio, screen-share, scheduling, reminders and calendar sync are all included with your Zinn Hub account. There's no setup fee, no subscription and no per-minute charge for the call. The only thing you might ever pay for is live translation, and only when you and the Zinner have no language in common.
What you never have to do
- Download anything. No external meeting apps, no browser extensions.
- Share personal contact details. No email addresses, no phone numbers, no personal meeting links change hands.
- Work out the time difference. Every time you see is already converted into your own timezone.
- Speak the Zinner's language. That's what live translation is for.
2. Where you find your calls
Everything lives in one place: your dashboard, under 📞 Calls.
/dashboard/buyer/calls/
That page holds:
- ⏳ To schedule — calls that exist but don't have a time yet. This is where a call you've bought (or been offered) waits for you to pick a slot.
- 📆 Upcoming calls — everything that's confirmed, with the time, duration, translation mode, the other person, and your Reschedule and Cancel controls.
- 💳 Call Credits — your balance, and where to buy more if you need them.
- 📅 Calendar sync — connect Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook or Apple CalDAV.
- Request a call — ask a Zinner for a call, rather than waiting for them to offer one.
Calls attached to an order also appear on the order page itself, so you never have to hunt for them.
3. The four ways you'll end up on a call
| How it starts | Do you pay for it? | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| You buy a call service | Yes — it's a listed Zinn, priced like any other | Buy it, then pick a slot from the Zinner's availability. It waits under To schedule until you do. |
| You accept a Custom Offer that is a call | Yes — the offer is priced | The offer arrives in your own language. Buy it, then schedule. |
| A Zinner shares a booking link | No — it's free | Open the link, sign in, pick a length and a slot. No checkout at all. |
| You request a call | No — it's free | From your Calls page, choose a Zinner and a slot. Great for a discovery chat before you commit to buying. |
About booking links
Zinners can share a permanent personal booking link, or send you a private one-time invite link. Either way:
- You'll be asked to sign in first. If you're logged out, you'll see the Zinner's name and an invitation to sign in or create a free account. You'll land straight back on the same page afterwards.
- Once you're in, the whole page appears in your language — the language you've chosen to be messaged in. If your language reads right to left, so does the page.
- Your timezone is detected and named on screen — you'll see something like "Times shown in Europe/Madrid", not a vague "your timezone". You can override it if you're travelling.
- The slot picker only shows times the Zinner is genuinely free. Their existing bookings and their synced calendar's busy times are already removed.
A one-time invite is bound to you. If a Zinner sends you a private invite link, it's tied to your account specifically, and it expires (30 days by default). It can only be booked once. A Zinner's permanent booking link, by contrast, never expires and can be reused any time.
4. Setting your call languages
On your Calls page, tell Zinn Hub which languages you can personally hold a live conversation in. Add as many as you like — it's a simple chip picker.
This is not the same as:
- Your display language — the language you read the Zinn Hub website in.
- Your communication language — the language your emails, notifications and messages arrive in.
Your call languages are specifically about speaking. Someone might comfortably read the site in English, prefer to be emailed in Spanish, and be able to hold a call in Spanish and Portuguese. All three settings can differ, and Zinn Hub handles each of them separately.
If you don't set any call languages, Zinn Hub falls back to your communication language. It's worth setting them properly, though — the more languages you list, the more likely you'll share one with a Zinner and skip translation entirely.
5. The language check: shared language, or a gap
Every time a call is booked, Zinn Hub compares your call languages against the Zinner's. There are only two outcomes.
✅ You share a language
Nothing else happens. You'll see a short green confirmation — something like "You both speak English — no translation needed." — and the call is booked. No credits, no prompts, no cost. This is the common case, and it's completely free.
🌍 There's a language gap
An amber banner appears, and the call can't be confirmed until live translation is arranged. That means two decisions get made:
Once those are settled and the credits are reserved, the call confirms as normal.
Bought a call before picking a time? The language check runs at the moment you pick your slot, not at checkout. A call you've already paid for can never end up scheduled without translation sorted out first.
6. Captions or spoken voice — which to choose
| Mode | What happens | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 💬 Live captions | Each speaker is transcribed, translated, and shown to the other person as on-screen subtitles in their own language, as the words are spoken. Everyone keeps their own natural voice on the call. | 1 Call Credit per minute |
| 🔊 Spoken voice | Everything captions do, plus a spoken translated audio track played to the listener. The original speaker is gently quietened underneath while the translation plays. | 2 Call Credits per minute |
A practical rule of thumb
- Choose captions when you're looking at something together — a screen-share, a design, code, a spreadsheet, a document. Precise wording matters, and reading it works well.
- Choose voice when you're talking, moving or doing. Coaching, teaching, fitness sessions, music lessons, long conversations. Your eyes stay free.
Captions still run alongside voice, so choosing voice never means losing the subtitles.
Whoever is paying picks the mode. If you're covering the translation, you'll see the mode selector and the credit cost before confirming. If the Zinner is covering it, you'll simply see a note — "Your host provides live translation for this call — free for you." — with no picker and no cost. Nobody can spend anyone else's credits.
Machine translation is very good, not flawless. For anything critical — a deadline, a specification, a price, a legal term — it's always worth confirming it in writing in the order thread afterwards, where you can use the "Show original" toggle to check exactly what was said.
7. Call Credits: what they are and who pays
Call Credits are only ever spent on live translation. They are never charged for the call itself. If you and your Zinner share a language, you will never need a single credit.
Buying credits
From the 💳 Call Credits card on your Calls page, you can buy:
- One-off packs — several sizes, with a better per-credit rate on larger packs.
- Monthly plans — a credit allowance each month at a lower rate, with unused credits rolling over up to a cap.
The live pack sizes and prices are always shown in your dashboard. Prices are in US dollars, with your own currency shown underneath as a helper — that conversion is display-only, so Zinn Hub never adds a hidden exchange margin.
The three numbers you'll see
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| Balance | Every credit you own. |
| Reserved | Credits held against calls you've already booked, so they can't be spent twice. |
| Available | Your balance minus everything reserved — what you can book a new call with. |
How reservations work
Credits behave like money in a wallet:
- You book → credits are reserved up front for the full booked length × the rate. The call can never quietly run past what's been paid for.
- You reschedule → the reservation moves with the call.
- You cancel → the reservation is released back to you in full.
- The call ends → only the minutes actually used are charged. Everything else goes straight back to your available balance.
Who covers the translation?
It's decided before anyone joins, and it's always visible on the call. Zinn Hub works down a clear order, most specific first:
- This one call Either of you can open an upcoming call and change "Who covers live translation for this call?" at any time. This beats everything below.
- This one person A private invite link or a Custom Offer written for you can carry its own who-pays choice.
- This one service A listed call service can be set to seller-covered or buyer-covered.
- The Zinner's default Every Zinner sets a default on their booking page: the person booking pays, or they cover it themselves.
- Sensible fallback Otherwise: you cover a discovery, pre-sales or booking-link call; the Zinner covers a delivery or follow-up call on work you've bought.
If a Zinner asks you to cover it and you'd rather they did — or vice versa — either of you can simply change it on the call, up until it starts. Changing who pays releases one person's hold and reserves the other's. If the new payer doesn't have enough credits, they'll be prompted to top up, and the switch won't go through until they do — so a call is never left unfunded.
Group calls with no language gap cost nothing. If everyone on the call shares a language, adding a person is completely free. Only translation ever costs credits.
8. Joining your call
- You'll be reminded 24 hours, 1 hour and 5 minutes before the call. Reminders arrive in your own language, showing the time in your own local timezone.
- The join link opens 5 minutes before the start time — on the order page and on your Calls page. There's a short grace period afterwards, so being a few minutes late isn't a disaster.
- Click it, and the call opens in your browser. Allow camera and microphone access when your browser asks. If translation was booked, captions or the translated voice track start with the call.
- Only people on the call's roster can get in. Even if a link were shared, nobody outside the booking can join.
Tip: if you've connected a calendar, the call is already in it, with the join link attached — so it'll pop up wherever you normally look.
9. Bringing a teammate along
If the Zinner has enabled group calls, you can add a colleague to your call — a teammate. Sellers can add other Zinners as co-hosts in the same way.
- Everyone must be a registered Zinn Hub user. There are no guest joins, no anonymous joins, and no email-only invites.
- You add people by username, using a type-to-search picker. You'll only be able to find people you have a real connection with — anyone you've messaged, transacted with, or shared a call with. No contact details are exchanged.
- The Zinner sets the seat limit, somewhere between 2 and 8, counting both of you.
- Whoever added someone can remove them. Removing a person releases their share of any reserved credit.
- Anyone added sees the call on their own dashboard, in their own Calls page and their own timezone and language.
If there is a language gap on a group call, translation costs more — more people means more languages to bridge. That extra credit is re-reserved under the same who-pays rule and shown to whoever is paying before the person is added. If the payer is short on credits, they'll be nudged to top up and the add won't go through.
10. Rescheduling, cancelling and reminders
Rescheduling
Either party can reschedule. Open the call on your Calls page or the order page, choose a new slot, and confirm. The other person is notified automatically — in their language, showing the new time in their timezone. Any credit reservation moves with the call.
Cancelling
Either party can cancel. The other person is notified, and any credit reservation is released in full, straight back to the available balance.
Reminders
Both of you get a reminder at 24 hours, 1 hour and 5 minutes before every call. Each reminder arrives in that person's own communication language, and states the time in that person's own timezone — so a 9pm call in Madrid reads as 9pm to you and 8pm to a Zinner in London, with no mental arithmetic.
Timezones, stated plainly
Every call row shows the time in your timezone, and also displays the other person's timezone and call language alongside it. There's never any ambiguity about "9pm whose time?".
11. Recordings and call history
Where recording is enabled for a call and both of you consented at booking, the session is recorded and stored for 90 days. You can download it and refer back to it whenever you like within that window.
You'll get a separate notification warning you before the recording is deleted — it's its own alert, so muting your general call notifications can't cause you to miss it.
Every call is also logged: when it started, how long it ran, which translation mode was used, who was on the roster, and where you are in a series of sessions. That history sits against your order, so there's a complete record of what was delivered.
12. Common questions
Do I need to install anything?
No. Zinn Calls run in your web browser on desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. You'll be asked to allow camera and microphone access, and that's it.
Does a call cost me anything?
The call itself, never. You only spend Call Credits on live translation, and only when you and the Zinner have no language in common — and even then, only if you're the one covering it.
Can I ask the Zinner to cover the translation?
Yes. On any upcoming call with a language gap, either of you can change "Who covers live translation for this call?". Talk to them in the order thread first — it's a conversation, not a fight over a setting.
Can I switch between captions and voice after booking?
Yes, if you're the one covering the translation. Whoever is paying controls the mode, and the credit reservation is recalculated when you switch.
What if my Zinner speaks a language I only partly understand?
Only list a language under "my call languages" if you're genuinely comfortable holding a live conversation in it. Listing a language you half-know tells Zinn Hub there's no gap, so no translation will be offered.
Can I be double-booked?
No. The slot picker only ever offers times when both of you are free. It removes existing bookings, and if you've connected an external calendar it removes your busy times too — reading only whether you're busy, never your event details.
What happens if I miss the call?
The join link stays open for a short grace period after the start time. Beyond that, message the Zinner in the order thread and reschedule. Any reserved credits aren't lost — only minutes actually used are ever charged.
Can I book a call before I buy anything?
Yes. Use Request a call on your Calls page, or open a Zinner's booking link. A discovery conversation is free — there's no checkout at all.
Is a Zinner's booking page public?
It's a permanent link anyone can reuse, but it isn't indexed by search engines, and a logged-out visitor sees nothing but the Zinner's name and a sign-in prompt — never their availability.
Who can offer calls?
Selling and offering calls is open to verified Zinners. Booking, buying and joining a call is open to every registered Zinn Hub user.
Related articles: Setting your display and communication languages · Understanding Custom Offers · Zinn Wallet and refunds · Zinn Calls overview · How language works across Zinn Hub
