While building your application locally, we recommend using LiveKit Cloud or LiveKit Open Source.

When you start testing with real users or go to production, LiveKit Cloud is what we recommend for most developers and teams. You can deploy LiveKit Open Source, but you'll need devops/SRE experience to operate your own network of media servers, load balance between them, and maintain high uptime.

LiveKit Private Cloud is an on-prem version of LiveKit Cloud which you managed yourself. It's designed for teams interested in operating their own high-scale, global media network using the same orchestration software and tooling that the LiveKit team uses in-house to manage LiveKit Cloud.

You can think of Cloud Plus as the "pro" tier of LiveKit Cloud. Some companies want additional features like region pinning − where audio and video data only flows through servers in a particular country or set of countries − or SAML SSO. These features are not free for us to build or maintain, so we've bundled them together and charge for access to them.

Yes! Every LiveKit Cloud project comes with a generous free tier which includes free bandwidth, egress, and ingress minutes. Your free allotment is fully replenished at the start of every month.

When you create or are invited to join a LiveKit Cloud project, that project comes with free resources: Real-Time (GB of bandwidth), Egress (minutes), and Ingress (minutes). When you build and run an application that uses LiveKit, we automatically meter your application's usage of these resources.

Yes. As long as your application's resource usage stays under your project's monthly free resource limit, you can use LiveKit Cloud for free, without a credit card, forever.

When your monthly usage approaches your monthly free limits, we nudge you to add a payment method to your project. If your application exhausts one or more of your monthly free resource limits (GB or minutes) and you haven't yet added a payment method, LiveKit Cloud's services will stop accepting API calls initiated by your application. Once you add a valid payment method, any restrictions on your project will be automatically removed.

We've written at length about our pricing model here. In short, the participant-minute model only makes sense if your users are spending a predictable amount of time in your app.

Our resource-based usage model works equivalently well for apps where end-users spend a fixed amount of time in them, but so much better for apps which are used for variable amounts of time (i.e. most apps).

For 95% of use cases, our resource-based usage model will be cheaper than what you'll pay another provider.

For the 5% of use cases where LiveKit isn't cheaper than your current provider, ping us and we'll work with you to match or beat their price.

It's tricky to calculate exactly how much you'll pay with us compared to other providers because we don't use the participant-minute pricing model (virtually everyone else does). You can try our pricing calculator for a rough estimate, or get in touch with us and we can help price things out for you.

Maybe! Get in touch with us at [email protected] and let's chat about your use case.

Yes, we do. Get in touch with us at [email protected] and let's chat about your recording or ingestion workload.