LiveKit
Open source WebRTC infrastructure
The Lens
WebRTC is notoriously painful to implement correctly. LiveKit handles the hard parts: media routing, quality adaptation, scaling, and cross-platform SDKs.
It's also become the go-to for AI voice agents. If you're building an app where an AI talks to users in real-time (think voice assistants, AI tutors, customer support bots), LiveKit's Agents framework handles the audio pipeline.
Apache 2.0. SDKs for React, Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, Python, and more.
The catch: WebRTC infrastructure is expensive to run at scale. Self-hosting LiveKit is free but you need serious server resources for media processing. This isn't a $5/mo VPS situation. And while LiveKit makes WebRTC easier, 'easier' is relative. Real-time media is inherently complex. Budget significant development time.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
free self hosted paid cloudFree (Apache 2.0): Full server, all SDKs, Agents framework, recording, egress/ingress. No feature restrictions. Self-host on your own infrastructure.
LiveKit Cloud:
- Pay-as-you-go: bandwidth and participant-minute based pricing
- Specific rates vary; check livekit.io/cloud for current pricing
- Includes managed infrastructure, global edge network, and SLA
Self-hosting cost: a media server needs CPU and bandwidth. A single server handles maybe 50-100 concurrent participants depending on quality settings. At $50-200/mo per server, costs add up fast with scale. LiveKit Cloud's per-minute pricing may be cheaper than self-hosting until you reach hundreds of concurrent users.
For AI Agents specifically: the compute cost of real-time speech-to-text and text-to-speech adds to whatever the media infrastructure costs.
Self-host free but budget for real server costs. Cloud pricing scales with usage, often cheaper at small scale.
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
Similar Tools
Scalable real-time messaging server in a language-agnostic way. Self-hosted alternative to Pubnub, Pusher, Ably, socket.io, Phoenix.PubSub, SignalR. Set up once and forever.
Open source notification infrastructure
Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
A complete web conferencing system for virtual classes and more!
About
- Stars
- 18,779
- Forks
- 1,996
Explore Further
More tools in the directory
openclaw
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
373.3k ★claw-code
The repo is finally unlocked. enjoy the party! The fastest repo in history to surpass 100K stars ⭐. Join Discord: https://discord.gg/5TUQKqFWd Built in Rust using oh-my-codex.
192.0k ★n8n
Fair-code workflow automation with native AI capabilities
188.8k ★