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.

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

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), and

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 viewers screen?

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

1. 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.

   • Convert bitrate (bps) to Bytes per second (Bps)

     • bitrate (Bps) = bitrate (bps) ÷ 8

   • Calculate bandwidth in bytes used for the session duration

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

   • Convert to GB

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

2. Calculate the total bandwidth for session

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

3. Estimate the bandwidth cost

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

Estimate connection minutes costs

1. Calculate the number of billable participants

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

2. Estimate the connection minute cost

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

Estimate Transcoding costs

1. Determine if you have any transcoding happening. This is required for most egress and ingress use cases. Transcoding is not required for:

   1. Most ingresses that use WHIP (*)

   2. Egresses that use Track egress

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

3. Estimate the transcoding cost

   1. Transcoding cost = Transcoding minutes × cost of transcoding minute