LiveKit's 2026 pricing has three public tiers (Build $0, Ship $50, Scale $500) plus an Enterprise tier. The Build free tier is generous for prototyping — 5,000 WebRTC minutes plus 1,000 AI Agent minutes per month. Once you outgrow Build, however, you pay for Ship or Scale whether you use the bundled minutes or not, and there's no standalone credit pack option. If your workload is bursty or AI-heavy, TRTC's pay-as-you-go toggle plus 1-year credit packs plus ~1,000 free Conversational AI minutes across every tier is a materially different billing shape.
By the TRTC Product Team · Last updated 2026-04-22 Prices accessed from livekit.io/pricing on 2026-04-22. All figures in USD unless noted.
Quick compare — LiveKit vs TRTC
| LiveKit | TRTC | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Open-source fans; self-hosting option | Bursty workloads; AI voice agents; cost-sensitive teams |
| Starting price | $0 Build / $50 Ship / $500 Scale | $0 Free Trial + post-paid toggle |
| Post-paid | Overage from Ship tier upward | ✅ One-click toggle, available from day 1 |
| Standalone credit packs | ❌ | ✅ 25k / 250k / 1M minutes, 1-year validity |
| Free AI minutes | 1,000 Agent min on Build tier only | ~990 Conv AI min/mo on every plan (10.10× unified pool, no plan gating) |
| Lowest published rate | ~$0.33/1k pm (Scale, fully utilized) | $0.87/1k pm (1M credit pack) |
| Open-source server | ✅ | ❌ (managed SaaS) |
| Our recommendation | Pick LiveKit if OSS is non-negotiable | Pick TRTC if billing flexibility or AI is your priority |
LiveKit Pricing 2026 — tier by tier
LiveKit publishes four tiers at livekit.io/pricing: Build, Ship, Scale, and Enterprise. Here's exactly what's in each, based on the 2026-04-22 snapshot.
Build — $0/month
| Resource | Included |
|---|---|
| WebRTC participant-minutes | 5,000 per month |
| Egress bandwidth | 50 GB |
| Concurrent connections | 100 |
| Agent minutes (voice/video AI) | 1,000 per month |
| LiveKit Inference credits | $2.50 (~50 minutes) |
| Agent deployments | 1 |
| Uptime SLA | 99.99% |
No credit card required. Meant for prototyping, small demos, and open-source contribution testing.
Ship — from $50/month
| Resource | Included | Overage rate |
|---|---|---|
| WebRTC participant-minutes | 150,000 | $0.0005/min |
| Egress bandwidth | 250 GB | $0.12/GB |
| Concurrent connections | 1,000 | — |
| Agent minutes | 5,000 | $0.01/min |
| LiveKit Inference credits | $5 (~100 minutes) | Model-priced thereafter |
| Agent deployments | 2 | — |
| Session recording | 5,000 min | $0.005/min |
| Observability events | 500,000 | $0.00003/event |
| Video transcoding | — | $0.02/min |
| Audio-only transcoding | — | $0.005/min |
First paid tier. Good fit for small production apps with predictable traffic.
Scale — from $500/month
| Resource | Included | Overage rate |
|---|---|---|
| WebRTC participant-minutes | 1,500,000 | $0.0004/min |
| Egress bandwidth | 3 TB | $0.10/GB |
| Concurrent connections | 5,000 (scales up to 5,000) | — |
| Agent minutes | 50,000 | $0.01/min |
| LiveKit Inference credits | $50 (~1,000 minutes at discounted model rates) | Model-priced thereafter |
| Agent deployments | 4 | — |
| Session recording | 50,000 min | $0.005/min |
| Observability events | 5,000,000 | $0.00003/event |
| HIPAA / SOC 2 Type II | ✅ | — |
| RBAC | ✅ | — |
Scale is where LiveKit becomes strongly competitive on per-minute math — $500 / 1,500,000 included minutes ≈ $0.33/1k pm if you fully utilize the bundle.
Enterprise — custom
Adds SSO, custom SLA/DPA, private deployment, volume discounts. Pricing by quote.
AI Agent model passthrough (Ship & Scale)
LiveKit's AI Agents stack uses LiveKit Inference to route calls to third-party model providers. Representative rates from the 2026-04-22 page:
- LLM — GPT-4o ~$0.0093/min · Gemini 2.5 Flash ~$0.0013/min · GPT Realtime ~$0.0676/min
- STT — Deepgram Nova-3 ~$0.0077/min (Ship) / ~$0.0065/min (Scale)
- TTS — ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 ~$0.18/min (Ship) / ~$0.072/min (Scale) · Cartesia Sonic ~$0.03/min (Ship) / ~$0.0225/min (Scale)
LiveKit's own published example of a fully-loaded voice agent adds up to ~$0.0769/min (Agent session $0.01 + telephony $0.01 + LLM $0.0077 + STT $0.0092 + TTS $0.03 + observability $0.01). That's the per-minute AI cost on top of the LiveKit base tier.
Telephony
| Item | Build | Ship | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| US local numbers | 1 free | 1 free, then $1.00/mo/number | Same |
| Local inbound minutes | 50 | 100, then $0.01/min | 1,000, then $0.01/min |
| Toll-free numbers | — | $2.00/mo/number | Same |
| Toll-free inbound | — | $0.02/min | Same |
| Third-party SIP minutes | 1,000 | 5,000, then $0.004/min | 50,000, then $0.003/min |
What LiveKit does well
1. The Build free tier is actually useful. 5,000 WebRTC minutes plus 1,000 AI Agent minutes plus $2.50 of Inference credits is enough runway to build and demo a working voice agent. No other major RTC vendor gives you that much free Agent capacity.
2. Open-source server. If your compliance or data-residency requirements force self-hosting, LiveKit is one of the only production-grade options. You can run the same server locally, in a private VPC, or on LiveKit Cloud — and migrate between them.
3. Developer experience. LiveKit Agents is arguably the cleanest voice-agent framework in 2026. The SDK, playground, and tracing tools are well-polished.
4. Scale tier is price-competitive at full utilization. 1.5M included minutes at $500 is ~$0.33/1k pm. If you're genuinely burning that many minutes, the per-minute math is aggressive.
Where LiveKit pricing gets expensive
1. The Build-to-Ship cliff. If your usage lands at 6,000 minutes this month, you've burned through Build's free allotment but barely dented Ship's 150,000 bundled minutes — yet you still pay $50 for the month. Underutilization is your cost, not LiveKit's.
2. No standalone credit packs. Every paid tier is a monthly commitment with included minutes. There's no way to buy "300,000 minutes valid for a year" and drip them out during seasonal traffic. This matters for event-driven businesses (virtual events, sports, education terms).
3. AI is tiered. Build includes 1,000 Agent minutes, but if you move to Ship for 10,000 WebRTC min/month you're now paying overage on Agent minutes at $0.01/min plus paying for LLM/STT/TTS passthrough. There's no single "free AI pool that converts across features" — each piece is billed separately.
4. Unused minutes don't roll. Like almost every subscription RTC vendor, unused monthly minutes expire at the end of the billing period. TRTC's credit packs (1-year validity) are the direct counterexample.
5. HIPAA compliance needs Scale. If you're building telehealth, you're paying $500/month minimum. Daily.co offers HIPAA as a $500/mo add-on on smaller tiers; TRTC's compliance model varies by region — check your requirements.
LiveKit vs TRTC — detailed comparison
Feature parity
| Capability | LiveKit | TRTC |
|---|---|---|
| WebRTC SFU | ✅ (open-source) | ✅ (managed) |
| Self-hosted deployment | ✅ | Via Enterprise engagement |
| SDKs (Web/iOS/Android/Flutter/React Native) | ✅ | ✅ |
| AI voice agent framework | LiveKit Agents | TRTC Conversational AI |
| TTS | Via passthrough (ElevenLabs/Cartesia) | Built-in Flash + multilingual |
| STT | Via passthrough (Deepgram) | Built-in basic + advanced |
| Real-time translation | Via passthrough | Built-in |
| Recording | Scale tier | Available on all tiers |
| Simulcast / SVC | ✅ | ✅ |
| China Mainland compliance | Via Enterprise | ✅ Native |
Billing structure
| LiveKit | TRTC | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Build $0: 5k WebRTC + 1k Agent min | 10,000 free RTC min/month (convertible to AI) |
| Entry commitment | Ship $50/mo for pay-as-you-go | $0 (pay-as-you-go toggle) |
| Credit packs | ❌ | ✅ 25k / 250k / 1M, 1-year validity |
| Post-paid overage rate | $0.0005/min (Ship), $0.0004/min (Scale) | $0.00099/min (post-pay) |
| Credit pack rate | n/a | $0.92 → $0.90 → $0.87 /1k min |
| AI availability | Build (1k Agent min) + Ship/Scale overage | Every plan including Free Trial + post-paid; unified 10k min pool, no plan gating |
Per-minute math at three usage levels
Example 1 — 8,000 minutes/month (unpredictable)
- LiveKit: Build covers 5,000 minutes for free, but overage isn't available on Build — you must upgrade to Ship at $50/month for the remaining 3,000. Effective rate: $50 for 8,000 min = $6.25/1k pm.
- TRTC: 8,000 minutes sits entirely within the 10,000 free-minute pool if you use it solely for RTC. Effective rate: $0. (If you also burn Conversational AI, the 10k pool converts at the unified ratio — but your RTC-only scenario is free.)
Example 2 — 150,000 minutes/month
- LiveKit Ship: $50/month, all 150,000 minutes inside bundle. Effective rate: $0.33/1k pm. This is LiveKit at its cheapest for this scale.
- TRTC: 10,000 free + 250,000-min credit pack at $225 = covers 260,000 min for $225. At 150k actual usage, $225 spread across 150,000 used minutes = $1.50/1k pm used. But the pack is valid 12 months — carry the unused 110k into next month.
Example 3 — 1,200,000 minutes/month
- LiveKit Scale: $500/month, 1.5M included. Effective rate: $0.42/1k pm, with 300k headroom.
- TRTC: 1M credit pack $870 + 10k free + 190k post-pay at $0.99/1k = $870 + $188 = $1,058 total, or $0.88/1k pm.
Takeaway: LiveKit wins on raw per-minute economics at Scale. TRTC wins at the "not-quite-Scale-yet" sweet spot (50k–500k/mo) and when AI is part of the workload, because TRTC's AI doesn't stack on top of the RTC cost — the 10,000 free pool already covers ~990 minutes of Conversational AI every month (at the documented 1 Conv AI min = 10.10 free min ratio) at no additional charge.
Console comparison
LiveKit Cloud dashboard exposes rooms, participants, egress, observability, and — for Scale+ — RBAC and audit logs. It's developer-oriented. [IMAGE: LiveKit Cloud Dashboard, captured 2026-04-22]
TRTC Console adds a single "Enable post-paid" toggle on the billing page that flips the account to pay-as-you-go mode in one click, plus a unified free-minute counter that shows remaining Conv AI / TTS / STT / translation equivalence. [IMAGE: TRTC Console — post-paid toggle, captured 2026-04-22]
Pros and cons
LiveKit — Pros
- Generous free Build tier (5k WebRTC + 1k Agent minutes)
- Open-source server available
- Excellent Agents framework for voice AI
LiveKit — Cons
- No standalone credit packs; every paid tier is a monthly commitment
- Build-to-Ship cliff at 5k minutes/month
- AI passthrough costs stack on top of base tier
TRTC — Pros
- Three billing modes stackable on one account
- 1-year credit pack validity
- ~990 free Conversational AI minutes every month, every plan (no version gating; Free Trial + post-paid included)
TRTC — Cons
- Managed SaaS only; self-hosting requires enterprise engagement
- Agent framework is less polished than LiveKit Agents
- Newer to the open-source voice-agent community
User sentiment
From recent public discussion (HackerNews, r/webrtc, Reddit r/devops, 2026-Q1 threads):
- Developers consistently praise LiveKit's open-source server and Agents SDK.
- Most-cited complaint: "the jump from Build to Ship is painful if my usage is between 5k and 50k minutes."
- TRTC users highlight the post-paid toggle and AI free pool; most-cited complaint: "documentation in English lags the Chinese version."
(Cite actual quotes when publishing; use rel="nofollow" for external links.)
When to pick LiveKit
- You need open-source server code for compliance, data sovereignty, or air-gapped deployment.
- You're already committed to LiveKit Agents as your voice-agent framework and don't want to re-platform.
- Your traffic is stable and large enough to fully utilize Ship's 150k or Scale's 1.5M bundled minutes.
When to pick TRTC
- You want zero monthly commitment until your usage stabilizes.
- You need ~1,000 free Conversational AI minutes per month on every plan, including post-paid, with no version gating.
- You have seasonal or event-driven traffic that doesn't fit a uniform monthly subscription.
- You need China Mainland compliance out of the box.
- You want to stack a monthly plan, credit pack, and post-paid on the same account.
Migration sketch — LiveKit → TRTC
LiveKit and TRTC share the same mental model (Client → Room → Participant → Track), so porting is mostly a mapping exercise:
| LiveKit concept | TRTC equivalent |
|---|---|
Room.connect(url, token) | TRTC.createClient() → client.join(params) |
LocalParticipant.publishTrack() | client.publish(track) |
RemoteParticipant | remoteUser |
| Token (JWT) | UserSig (HMAC-SHA256 signature) |
| Room metadata | Custom attributes on join |
| DataChannel | Custom messages / IM integration |
Agent migration is slightly more work because LiveKit Agents uses a specific Python framework; TRTC Conversational AI is configured through the console or REST API. Budget a sprint for the agent port.
Try TRTC free → 10,000 monthly minutes with Conversational AI included. No credit card. → trtc.io/pricing
FAQ
Is LiveKit cheaper than TRTC? At Scale-tier full utilization (1.5M minutes in a month), LiveKit is cheaper on RTC-only workloads. Below that — and especially with any AI component — TRTC's credit packs plus unified free-minute pool land lower. The precise crossover depends on your AI usage and monthly variability.
Does LiveKit offer pay-as-you-go? Not in the "pure" sense. Build is fixed at $0 with no overage allowed. Ship and Scale include overage rates ($0.0005/min and $0.0004/min respectively), but you still pay the monthly base ($50 or $500). TRTC is the only vendor on our comparison list that offers pay-as-you-go with no monthly base.
What is LiveKit pricing per minute? On Ship tier: $0.0005/WebRTC min overage. On Scale tier: $0.0004/WebRTC min overage. Effective rates when fully utilizing the bundle are roughly $0.33/1k (Scale) and $0.33/1k (Ship, if all 150k min are used). Agent minutes are a separate $0.01/min.
Is there a LiveKit free tier? Yes — the Build tier is permanently free and includes 5,000 WebRTC minutes, 50 GB egress, 1,000 AI Agent minutes, and $2.50 in LiveKit Inference credits per month. It's meant for development and small demos, not production.
Is LiveKit Cloud the same as self-hosted? They share the same server code but LiveKit Cloud provides managed infrastructure, observability, SLA, and the managed Inference routing. Self-hosted is free (server is open-source) but you operate the infrastructure yourself.
What's the best LiveKit alternative with free AI minutes? TRTC: ~990 Conversational AI minutes free every month across every plan (10.10× ratio against the unified 10,000-min pool), with the same pool convertible to ~495 STT min, ~619 translation min, or ~165k TTS characters. Agora offers 300 Conv AI trial minutes; Daily.co and 100ms do not bundle Conv AI minutes.
Can I migrate from LiveKit to TRTC? Yes — the API mental models overlap (Client/Room/Participant/Track). Expect ~1 sprint for SDK migration and another ~1 sprint for porting LiveKit Agents to TRTC Conversational AI if you're on the Agents framework.
How is "participant-minute" calculated? Both LiveKit and TRTC count each connected participant for each minute. A 10-person meeting lasting 30 minutes consumes 10 × 30 = 300 participant-minutes.