We've made it less expensive to build and run agents on LiveKit.
As of this month, agent session minutes and recording, WebRTC connections, and SIP connections will be charged per-second with a ten second minimum increment, so you only pay for what you use. This change applies to all plans and accounts, including enterprise contracts, and involves no customer-facing technical changes — you simply see a lower bill that more closely reflects actual usage.
This change is already live for current customers, and will be reflected in your September bill for August usage.
Why we did it#
While it is always nice to offer savings to customers, the main driver behind this change is more about our underlying philosophy: we build for builders. That means giving people the tools and infrastructure they need to build and deploy humanlike agents for any use case they can dream up, not just the ones we might have in mind. As part of this, a flexible, developer-friendly platform needs to be enabled by flexible, developer-friendly billing that maps to the realities of the widest possible cross-section of scenarios.
Per-minute billing makes sense for typical inbound customer support calls that last for at least a minute or two while an agent solves the user's problem. It is rare that these calls are extremely short duration, so billing and usage stay tightly aligned. The same cannot be said for outbound calls, however; sometimes you connect to the wrong person, sometimes you reach an answering machine, and so on. In these situations calls are substantially shorter, often lasting only a matter of seconds, yet per-minute billing fails to account for this. In other words, scaling the outbound use case ends up restricted not by any technical limitations, but by the manner in which services are billed.
Our move to per-second pricing eliminates these pricing mismatches so you can build agents with highly specialized roles without worrying about paying for minutes that you don't use. Think of it as one fewer obstacle between your vision and reality. No need to worry about billing structure — just keep building.