LiveKit Agents
apache 2.0 top to bottom — self-host it and the platform fee simply stops existing.
the best licence in the category and the most honest component pricing — you just have to do the addition yourself.
the agents framework and the media server are both apache 2.0, confirmed from the repository licence file rather than the readme. self-host and there is no livekit fee at all; you pay your stt, llm and tts providers directly and run your own infrastructure. that is the same escape hatch llama.cpp gives local models, and no closed platform here can match it.
on livekit cloud the $0.01 session fee is only orchestration, but livekit publishes explicit rate ranges for every other component, so a realistic total is arithmetic rather than guesswork: about $0.095 a minute for a mid-tier stack, as low as $0.03 with cheap components, over $0.25 with premium tts. the free tier gives 1,000 agent session minutes a month plus a us phone number.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- ai voice agent platforms
- pricing
- $0.01/min
- website
- livekit.com
the best licence in the category and the most honest component pricing — you just have to do the addition yourself.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more ai voice agent platforms
Retell AI
we checked this$0.07/minthe only vendor whose headline band already includes telephony, stt, tts and the llm — with the sub-rates printed underneath.
Pipecat
we checked thisfree self-hostedbsd-licensed, provider-agnostic, and free if you run it yourself — the framework the others are competing with.