Understanding and Estimating Pricing for Video Conference and Livestream Use Cases

LiveKit Cloud pricing is usage-based. This guide breaks down the cost components of the pricing specifically for livestream and video conference use cases. For detailed pricing information, visit our pricing page.

Note: Telephony and agents are not discussed in detail below. If you have any telephony or agents in the room, please see the pricing page for details on how to estimate pricing for those participants.

Key Pricing Components

1. Connection Minutes

• Per participant minute (after the minutes included on your selected plan)
• Every human or agent participant connected minute is counted (i.e., ingress, egress, and SIP users are not charged for connection minutes)

2. Bandwidth Usage

• Per GB (after GB included with selected plan)
• Calculated based on outbound traffic to participants from LiveKit servers

3. Transcoding Minutes

• Per minute (after minutes included with selected plan)
• Applies to ingress and egress use cases

What Participant Types Are Charged Connection Minutes?

More details about participant types can be found in our documentation.

Participant Types Charged for Connection Minutes

• Standard — any standard, human participant
• Agent — AI agent participants

Participant Types Not Charged for Connection Minutes

• Egress — You are still charged for transcoding minutes
• Ingress — You are still charged for transcoding minutes
• SIP — SIP participants are charged a per minute SIP telephony charge instead

Estimating Costs

The steps below provide a reasonable approach to estimating costs. However, this is not perfect and it is only meant to give you a rough guide to costs.

Gather Inputs

1. Duration of a session in minutes
2. Expected average bitrate in bits per second (bps)
3. Number of participants
4. Selected plan from LiveKit pricing page so you can retrieve the various usage costs for the below calculations

Estimate Bandwidth Costs

Estimating bandwidth requires several pieces of information:

Video:

• The resolution and size of the video displayed to the viewer(s) in the room
• The video encoding

Audio:

• The audio encoding

Participants:

• How many will be sharing audio and video?
• How many tiles will be visible on the viewer's screen?

Once you have this information, estimate a bitrate (in bps) that each participant will receive from LiveKit.

Pro Tip: Verify your actual bitrate requirements using test broadcasts in your LiveKit Cloud project. Many scenarios can use lower bitrates while maintaining quality. See our bitrate guide for recommendations.

Calculate bandwidth in GB sent to each participant on average for the session duration

You will only pay for the bandwidth sent to the participant from the LiveKit servers.

Step 1: Convert bitrate (bps) to Bytes per second (Bps)

bitrate (Bps) = bitrate (bps) ÷ 8

Step 2: Calculate bandwidth in bytes used for the session duration

Bandwidth (Bytes) = bitrate (Bps) × duration (seconds)

Step 3: Convert to GB

Bandwidth (GB) = Bandwidth (Bytes) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024

Step 4: Calculate the total bandwidth for session

Total Bandwidth (GB) = Bandwidth (GB) × number of participants

Step 5: Estimate the bandwidth cost

Bandwidth Cost = Total Bandwidth (GB) × cost per GB

Estimate Connection Minutes Costs

Step 1: Calculate the number of billable participants

Number of billable participants = Sum of participants that are not ingress, egress, or SIP participant types

Step 2: Estimate the connection minute cost

Connection Minutes Cost = Number of billable participants × Duration of session in minutes × cost per minute

Estimate Transcoding Costs

Step 1: Determine if you have any transcoding happening

Transcoding is required for most egress and ingress use cases. Transcoding is not required for:

• Most ingresses that use WHIP (*)
• Egresses that use Track egress

Step 2: Calculate the minutes of transcoding

For room composite egresses, web egresses, and all ingresses:

transcoding minutes = number of minutes the egress/ingress was in room

For participant composite egresses:

transcoding minutes = participant minutes

Step 3: Estimate the transcoding cost

Transcoding cost = Transcoding minutes × cost of transcoding minute

Note: Both SIP minutes and Connection minutes calculations above assume all participants stay for the same length of time. However, in reality, this is usually not the case. If you want a more accurate estimate, you will need to sum each participant's connected minutes individually.