What we have learned building live streaming, voice and real-time apps — architecture, costs and the decisions that are hard to reverse. Written for the people who have to ship it, not for a keyword.
Most agencies answer this with "contact us". Here are the actual numbers: what a live streaming app costs to build at each scope, what PK battles, Ludo and agency panels add, what it costs to run every month, and why the same brief gets quoted at $2,000 by one team and $80,000 by another.
Read the articleAgora and ZegoCloud charge per participant-minute, which means the month your app finally takes off is the month the invoice stops making sense. LiveKit is open source and self-hostable, so the per-minute line disappears and you pay for servers you control instead. Here is the honest version of that trade — the maths, the architecture, and the cases where self-hosting is the wrong answer.
Read the articleSend us the numbers and we will tell you honestly what we would do — including when the answer is to change nothing.
