Video API Pricing Compared: Agora vs Daily vs LiveKit vs Twilio

On paper, LiveKit Cloud looks eight times cheaper than Daily, Twilio, and Agora: $0.50 per 1,000 participant-minutes versus $4.00. In reality, once you factor in the bandwidth LiveKit bills separately, the gap shrinks to roughly two to three times, not eight. That distance between the pricing-page number and the actual invoice is what this comparison is really about.

Agora, Daily, LiveKit, and Twilio all sell real-time video, but they don't bill it the same way. One charges per participant-minute, one by the resolution each user receives, and one by a monthly plan plus bandwidth. Below are their list prices as of September 2026, taken straight from each vendor's own pricing page, followed by two worked examples at 100,000 and 1,000,000 participant-minutes a month. My short answer: the rate on the pricing page is the wrong number to compare. Model your own layout, your own recording habits, and your own bandwidth first.

What You're Actually Paying For

A participant-minute: one person connected to a call for one minute.

A 10-person meeting that runs for an hour is 600 participant-minutes, not 60. That's the unit Daily and Twilio bill in, and the one LiveKit uses for its included allowance. It's also why video API bills grow faster than most teams expect: the multiplier is the number of people in the room.

The four vendors turn that unit into money in three different ways:

How to Compare Video API Pricing

A per-minute rate on its own tells you very little. Check these five things before you compare two vendors.

1. Is bandwidth included? Twilio states there is no separate bandwidth charge. LiveKit bills data transfer as its own line. Daily's and Agora's pricing pages list per-minute rates and don't mention a bandwidth charge, so confirm it with them in writing if you're close to signing.
2. What decides the rate? Time connected, resolution received, or plan tier. Each behaves very differently once your product ships a new layout or a larger room.
3. What's the monthly floor? LiveKit's paid plans start at $50 and $500 a month. Daily and Twilio have no minimum. Agora's public pricing shows none, and directs larger customers to contact sales.
4. What do recording, transcription, and phone add? Plenty of products end up spending more on extras than on the calls themselves. See the extras table below.
5. What happens at volume? Daily publishes automatic discounts. Twilio says committed-use discounts exist but doesn't publish them. Model your expected growth, not just today's traffic.

1. Agora: Priced by Resolution

• Managed API
• Per 1,000 minutes
• Not self-hostable

Agora runs its own real-time network and prices video in tiers. Its docs say usage is calculated from each user's aggregate resolution, meaning the combined resolution of all the video streams that user subscribes to. That single sentence is the whole pricing model, and it's easy to overlook.

Here's what it means in practice. A 720p stream is 1280 by 720, or 921,600 pixels, which is the top of the HD tier. In a one-to-one call, each user receives one remote stream and pays the HD rate. In a four-person gallery where each user receives three 720p streams, the aggregate is 2,764,800 pixels. That lands in the 2K tier, at $15.99 per 1,000 minutes instead of $3.99. Same product, same number of minutes, four times the rate.

Where it's cheap

• Audio-only at $0.99 per 1,000 minutes, the same as Daily's $0.00099 per participant-minute.
• One-to-one HD calls at $3.99 per 1,000 minutes match Daily and Twilio.
• 10,000 free minutes every month.
• Apps that subscribe to small thumbnails for most participants keep the aggregate low.

Where the bill grows

• Gallery layouts and multi-stream screens push users into the Full HD, 2K and 2K+ tiers.
• The main pricing page says video "starts at $0.59 per 1,000 minutes". The docs table puts the cheapest video tier at $3.99, so budget from the docs, not the headline.
• Cloud recording is priced separately, and the recording line on the pricing page is a "starts at" figure.

Pricing

Per 1,000 minutes: audio $0.99, HD video $3.99, Full HD $8.99, 2K $15.99, 2K+ $35.99. 10,000 free minutes a month. Agora pricing docs

2. Daily: One Rate, Easy to Predict

• Managed API
• Per participant-minute
• Not self-hostable

Daily has the plainest pricing of the four. After 10,000 free participant-minutes a month you pay $0.004 for each additional minute, with no plan tiers and no minimum spend. Its pricing page describes the service as pay-as-you-go with no hard cap that stops calls when the free minutes run out.

Daily is also the only one of the four that publishes its volume discounts: 7% off between 100,000 and 500,000 minutes a month, rising to 63% off above 50 million, where the rate reaches $0.0015. That makes it the easiest to forecast, and the discount ladder matters if you expect to grow.

Where it's cheap

• Audio-only calls at $0.00099 per participant-minute, with a volume rate down to $0.00036.
• No plan fee, so a small product pays only for what it uses.
• Published volume discounts, so you can plan the cost of growth.
• The Pipecat team's voice-agent tooling sits alongside it. See our LiveKit Agents vs Pipecat comparison for that side.

Where the bill grows

• Recording is $0.01349 per recorded minute, and live streaming is $0.015 (RTMP) or $0.03 (HLS) per encoded minute.
• Realtime transcription is $0.0059 per unmuted participant-minute, which adds about 150% to the base call rate for anyone who talks.
• Phone dial-in and dial-out are billed separately at $0.018 to $0.03 per minute for PSTN.

Pricing

$0.004 per participant-minute for video and audio after 10,000 free minutes a month. Audio-only $0.00099 (volume $0.00036). Daily Video SDK pricing

3. LiveKit Cloud: Cheap Minutes, Metered Bandwidth

• Managed API + open source
• Apache 2.0
• Self-hostable

LiveKit is the odd one out in this comparison. It's open source under Apache 2.0, so the same stack can run on your own servers, and LiveKit Cloud is the paid managed version. Cloud pricing is a plan plus usage rather than a single rate.

Build is free and includes 5,000 WebRTC participant-minutes. Ship starts at $50 a month and includes 150,000 minutes, then charges $0.0005 per minute. Scale starts at $500 a month, includes 1.5 million minutes, and charges $0.0004 per minute after that. Each plan also includes an amount of data transfer, then bills the rest per gigabyte.

Where it's cheap

• Per-minute overage of $0.0005 is a fraction of the $0.004 the other three charge.
• 150,000 minutes included on Ship covers a lot of early traffic for $50 a month.
• You can leave for your own servers without changing SDKs. Our guide to self-hosting LiveKit on AWS shows that path.
• Agent session minutes are priced at $0.01 after the included allowance, which matters for voice AI.

Where the bill grows

• Data transfer is billed at $0.12 per GB on Ship and $0.10 per GB on Scale beyond the included 250 GB and 3 TB. For video, this is usually the biggest line, not the minutes.
• Video recording costs $0.02 per minute on Ship and $0.015 on Scale, after the included minutes.
• Plan floors of $50 and $500 a month apply whether or not you use the allowance.
• Agent sessions, WebRTC connections and SIP are metered by the second, with a 10-second minimum per session. Recording is metered from the first second.

Pricing

Build $0, Ship from $50 a month, Scale from $500 a month, Enterprise custom. Overage $0.0005 (Ship) or $0.0004 (Scale) per participant-minute, plus data transfer. LiveKit pricing

4. Twilio Video: Simple Rate, No Standing Free Tier

• Managed API
• Per participant-minute
• Not self-hostable

Twilio Video announced its end of life in late 2023, then reversed the decision in October 2024. Its pricing page lists it as a current product today. The pricing is the simplest of the four: $0.004 per participant-minute in group rooms, "no subscriptions", and no separate charge for bandwidth or data transfer.

Where it's cheap

• Predictable: one rate, no plan fee, no bandwidth line.
• Convenient if you already pay Twilio for SMS, voice or SIP and want one bill and one account.
• Volume and committed-use discounts exist, though Twilio doesn't publish them.

Where the bill grows

• Recording is $0.004 per participant per minute, and composing the tracks into a single MP4 costs another $0.01 per composed minute.
• Recording storage is $0.00167 per GB per day after the first 10 GB.
• Trial credit only, so every production minute is billed from the first one.
• The pricing page lists nothing separate for audio-only calls, so plan on the video rate.

Pricing

$0.004 per participant-minute in group rooms. Recording $0.004 per participant-minute, composition $0.01 per composed minute. Twilio Video pricing

Video API Pricing Side by Side

List prices at standard HD video, before volume discounts, checked on September 24, 2026. Everything is shown per 1,000 participant-minutes so the columns line up.

"Not listed" means the vendor's pricing page doesn't mention a separate bandwidth charge either way. It isn't a confirmation that none exists. Vendors change prices, so check each pricing page before you sign.

What 100,000 and 1 Million Minutes Actually Cost

List rates are only half the picture, so here's a worked example. It assumes video calls where each participant receives one 720p stream at about 1.5 Mbps, which is roughly 0.675 GB per participant-hour. That's my own estimate, not a quote from any vendor, and real traffic will vary with layout and codec.

Agora and Daily figures subtract the 10,000 free minutes and are before volume discounts. Agora's docs say free minutes are folded into the price of a paid package, so treat its numbers as approximate. LiveKit at 100,000 minutes is the $50 Ship plan plus about 875 GB of data transfer beyond the included 250 GB. At 1,000,000 minutes it's the $500 Scale plan plus about 8,250 GB beyond the included 3 TB. Recording, transcription and phone are excluded.

The other thing the table shows is how little separates Daily, Twilio, and Agora's HD tier. They're within about 10% of each other at either volume, so on price alone they're interchangeable. I wouldn't choose between them on price. Pick on SDKs, support, and whether the rest of your stack already lives with one of them. Agora only stays in that band if you keep screens to a single stream per user.

The Extras That Change the Bill

Recording, transcription, and phone calls are where a product's real bill diverges from the base rate. These are the rates each vendor lists.

"Not listed" means it wasn't on the pricing pages checked for this article. It doesn't mean the vendor lacks the feature. For voice agents specifically, our WebRTC for AI voice agents guide covers what else goes into the bill.

Recording is the one to watch. On Daily, a recorded minute at $0.01349 costs more than three times the $0.004 participant-minute rate. On Twilio, recording every participant plus composing the result can cost more than the call did. If you plan to record most calls, price that first.

When Self-Hosting Beats Per-Minute Pricing

Where I'd Start