LiveKit Cloud’s pricing model is different from the industry norm.

You only pay for the resources you use:

1. Compute: the time your users spend connected to our servers
2. Bandwidth: the data your application transfers over LiveKit’s network

For simplicity we chose to embed the cost of compute into our bandwidth price. This worked well for video-heavy use cases, which accounted for majority of projects when we first launched. The cost of transmitting lots of video dwarfs any cost associated with keeping servers running to maintain connections.

Recently though, we’ve seen an explosion of multimodal AI applications built on our platform. These applications are voice-heavy. Voice uses much less bandwidth (20-96 kbps) than video, but the same amount of compute. That means today, video applications on LiveKit Cloud are subsidizing compute costs for voice applications.

As we double-down on building infrastructure for AI use cases, we’re updating our pricing model to better and more fairly reflect a project’s true resource usage.

Changes to our pricing model

We’re making three important modifications to our core model:

1. Connection fee: We will now charge a small fee for the length of time a participant is connected to our servers. This fee starts at $0.0005/minute and goes down with volume.
2. Lower bandwidth fee: Since we’re no longer embedding connection-related costs in our bandwidth pricing, we’re lowering our bandwidth fee. It previously started at $0.18 per GB. It now starts at $0.12 per GB and goes down with volume.
3. Upstream bandwidth is now free: We will no longer meter data sent from your application to LiveKit servers. You’ll only be metered on downstream bandwidth (henceforth referred to simply as bandwidth) — data transmitted from LiveKit servers to your application.

Projects with high amounts of video transfer, such as live streaming or video conferencing, should be virtually unaffected by these changes or even see their monthly bill decrease.

Self-serve pricing plans

We’re also introducing pricing plans. Each plan comes with additional platform features and an allotment of free resources. Our intent is to save developers time and money with prepackaged bundles containing the common needs of a project at discrete stages of growth. You can dive into all the details on our pricing page, but here are the plans in broad strokes:

Pricing change timeline

Starting today, all new projects created on LiveKit Cloud will need to select a pricing plan.

For existing (i.e. created before today) LiveKit Cloud projects:

• If you have a signed commercial agreement with us, we’ve already chatted with you or someone on your team.
• If you have not signed a commercial agreement, these pricing changes won’t take effect until February 1st, 2025. You’ll have six months to assess the impact of your application’s resource usage and associated costs under our updated model. We’re adding a section to your project’s dashboard to help you compare your costs before and after. On February 1st 2025, you will be required to choose a pricing plan. If desired, you can switch to a pricing plan early in your project’s dashboard.

Regardless of which bucket you fall in, if you have any questions or want to discuss these changes or your options in more detail, please reach out to me (DMs open) or the team.

Looking ahead

Few would argue that there’s ever been a more exciting time to be a developer working on realtime multimodal applications. We’re certainly excited to keep building services and tools to help you build products more quickly. Products that you’re proud of and that your users love. This change to our pricing ensures we can do that for many years to come.

Ok, let’s get back to building!