Is self-hosting LiveKit cost-effective at scale

Self Hosting
1

We are currently using LiveKit Cloud on the Ship plan ($50/month), and it has been working well for our initial phase. We are now preparing to scale significantly and expect to support anywhere between 100 to 1,000 concurrent agent sessions. ( or even burst traffic )

As part of this scaling effort, we are evaluating two paths:

  1. Continuing with LiveKit Cloud under a potentially upgraded or custom pricing model.

  2. Self-hosting LiveKit (on EKS) and deploying our agents alongside it.

Our use case involves recording conversations, performing post-session analysis (summarization, evaluation, ranking), and storing structured metadata for downstream processing. Given this, we want to ensure we architect the system correctly for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

We would really appreciate your guidance on:

  • Best practices for scaling LiveKit to the 100–1000 concurrent session range.

  • Recommended architecture for self-hosting (single-home vs multi-region, TURN considerations, autoscaling strategies).

  • Any known bottlenecks or scaling constraints we should anticipate for agent-heavy workloads.

  • Whether LiveKit offers custom pricing tiers or volume-based plans that may be more cost-effective at this scale.

  • If cost optimization is our primary objective, would you recommend self-hosting over LiveKit Cloud, or is there a hybrid model you suggest?

Our primary goal is to keep costs as low as possible while maintaining production-grade reliability and global performance.

2

Self-hosting for production scale, reliability and cost efficiency is definitely possible, and is being used as such by multiple companies. You have all the control, and you can customise for your use case and domain. Livekit scales really well for thousands of concurrent sessions. Almost all functionality in Livekit is open source (thanks to the Livekit team!) except for a few features such as multi-homing i.e. the ability to spread a single room across servers. If cost efficiency is your primary goal (and maybe control), then self-hosting will be the most cost effective - however, you do spend on other aspects such as engineering time - so do keep that in mind.