Sendbird Pricing: Plans, Usage Costs, and What to Expect
Sendbird pricing starts at $349/month with annual billing. Compare chat plans, usage limits, and voice and video costs before choosing a plan.
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Sendbird starts at $349/month with annual billing, or $399 month to month, for 5,000 monthly active chat users.
But choosing a plan takes more than counting users. You also need to know how many connect at once, which features you need, and whether you’ll add voice, video, or AI.
I’ll walk through the pricing and a few examples so you can work out what Sendbird would cost you. 👇
Key takeaways
- Chat pricing depends on usage and features: Starter begins at $349/month with annual billing. Pro starts at $499/month on the same billing cycle.
- Concurrent connections matter: A busy event can push you over your connection allowance even when you’re within your monthly user limit.
- Other products cost extra: Calls are billed per minute, per participant. Business Messaging and AI agents need separate quotes.
- ✨ Featurebase fits customer support workflows: Consider it if you need an inbox, AI support, and a help center for customers contacting your team.
What is Sendbird?
Sendbird gives developers the tools to add chat to an app. Its APIs, SDKs, and UI kits support one-to-one and group conversations, with features like read receipts, threads, and moderation.
Think of buyers messaging sellers in a marketplace. Your developers build the experience, and Sendbird handles the messaging behind it.
Sendbird pricing plans
Sendbird prices Chat, Calls, and its other products separately. All prices below are in USD, checked in October 2026.
Chat API pricing
Sendbird chat pricing depends on your monthly active users (MAUs) and whether you choose Starter, Pro, or Enterprise.
| Monthly active users | Starter, annual billing | Starter, monthly billing | Pro, annual billing | Pro, monthly billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $349/mo | $399/mo | $499/mo | $599/mo |
| 10,000 | $429/mo | $519/mo | $579/mo | $699/mo |
| 25,000 | $1,119/mo | $1,349/mo | $1,399/mo | $1,649/mo |
| 50,000+ | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
Annual prices show the monthly equivalent of an annual subscription. Enterprise pricing is custom.
Free trial and Developer plan
The free trial includes all Pro features, 1,000 MAUs, and 20 peak concurrent connections. No credit card is required, and you can’t go over the trial’s usage limits.
There’s also a free Developer plan for building and testing. It has its own limits, so don’t assume the trial allowance carries over.
Starter
Starter covers messaging essentials, basic moderation, and ticketed support. It’s a sensible starting point for standard in-app chat.
I’d check your feature list before choosing it, though. Needing one Pro feature can mean paying for the whole upgrade.
Pro
Pro adds features such as:
- Translation
- Data export
- Image moderation
- Supergroup channels
You might need Pro well before reaching a higher user tier. For example, a community app that needs image moderation may choose it from day one.
Enterprise
Enterprise offers custom pricing for needs such as dedicated infrastructure, longer message retention, and additional support.
Ask for an itemized quote. Some features are optional add-ons, so “Enterprise” doesn’t automatically mean everything is included.
Voice and video calls pricing
Sendbird Calls charges per minute, per participant. A 10-minute call between 2 people uses 20 billable minutes.
| Call type | Peer-to-peer rate | Server-relayed rate |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | $0.0010 per user/minute | $0.0015 per user/minute |
| Video | $0.0014 per user/minute | $0.0035 per user/minute |
Cloud recording costs extra: $0.0014 per minute for voice and $0.0059 per minute for video. Recording is priced per minute, without the per-user multiplier shown above.
Volume discounts are available. Your cost also depends on how much traffic uses the higher server-relayed rates.
Business Messaging pricing
Business Messaging uses custom quotes for channels including in-app messages, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and KakaoTalk.
Chat plans include some in-app notification allowances. Check what’s already covered before budgeting for additional channels or volume.
AI-agent pricing
Sendbird’s AI-agent page now redirects to Delight.ai, where you need to contact sales for pricing.
The $349 Chat subscription doesn’t cover this product. If you’re shopping for AI support, get a separate quote that spells out what counts as billable usage.
What can increase your Sendbird costs?
I’d check usage limits and required features first. These can change which plan you need.
Active users and concurrent connections
A monthly active user is someone who connects to Sendbird through your app’s Client SDK within the past 30 days. They count even if they never send a message.
Peak concurrent connections are the most devices connected at the same time during the month. Starter and Pro include connections equal to 5% of your MAU tier:
| MAU tier | Included peak concurrent connections |
|---|---|
| 5,000 | 250 |
| 10,000 | 500 |
| 25,000 | 1,250 |
Say your app has 5,000 active chat users. If more than 250 devices connect during a live event, you can exceed the connection allowance without exceeding the user allowance.
Both limits can trigger overage charges. Ask Sendbird for the current rates and use your busiest expected month when estimating costs.
Features and message history
Starter, Pro, and the trial list 6 months of message retention. Unlimited messages and storage don’t mean your message history stays available forever.
If you need longer retention, discuss Enterprise pricing. If you need translation, exports, or image moderation, budget for Pro.
Development time
Your developers still need to integrate Sendbird, handle authentication, and maintain the chat experience. Include that work when comparing Chat API pricing with building chat yourself or buying a ready-made support tool.
Sendbird cost examples
Here’s how the numbers work in practice. These examples exclude taxes, overages, and unlisted extras.
Starter with 5,000 monthly active users
Your marketplace needs basic chat and stays within 250 concurrent connections.
Annual billing: $349 × 12 = $4,188/year.
Monthly billing for 12 months: $399 × 12 = $4,788.
That’s a $600 saving with annual billing. I’d make sure Starter covers your needs before committing to the year.
Pro with 25,000 monthly active users
Your community needs Pro features and stays within 1,250 concurrent connections.
Annual billing: $1,399 × 12 = $16,788/year.
Monthly billing for 12 months: $1,649 × 12 = $19,788.
Annual billing saves $3,000 here. Any overages or additional products come on top.
Adding voice calls
Your users make 1,000 voice calls a month. Each call lasts 10 minutes and has 2 participants.
Usage: 1,000 × 10 × 2 = 20,000 participant-minutes.
Peer-to-peer voice cost: 20,000 × $0.0010 = $20/month.
At the server-relayed rate, the same usage costs $30/month. Recording and any Chat subscription are separate.
Is Sendbird worth the cost?
Sendbird makes sense when chat is part of your product and you want to save your developers from building the messaging system themselves.
I’d compare its subscription and integration costs with the work of building and maintaining chat in-house. Use the trial to check the features, then estimate both normal usage and busy periods. Compare Sendbird alternatives using the same usage and integration assumptions.
If all you need is a way for customers to ask your team for help, a customer support platform is worth considering.
What if you mainly need customer support?
Featurebase brings AI-powered support, a help center, and customer feedback into one platform. It fits software teams whose customer base is growing faster than their support capacity and who want to automate repetitive work.
You get a ready-made inbox for helping customers. For user-to-user chat inside a marketplace or community, you’d still need a messaging product like Sendbird.
Top features:
- Omnichannel inbox – Manage live chat, email, and Slack conversations from one AI-powered view
- Fibi AI Agent - Resolve customer issues on autopilot & run custom actions like trial extensions and refunds
- Help center with AI search – Provide instant, multilingual self-serve answers
- Workflows & automations – Auto-assign tickets, route conversations, collect customer data, and more
- AI Copilot – Help your agents answer customers faster with AI Copilot that uses your internal knowledge
- Multi-brand support – Manage multiple Help Centers and Live chats from a single workspace
- Automatic AI translations – Automatically translate all messages and help articles to your customers’ native language
- Service Level Agreements – Track SLAs to make sure your team responds to customers on time, every time
- Mobile app – Respond to customers, receive notifications, and unblock users on the go
- Feedback & roadmap tools – Collect feature requests and close the loop with updates
- Product updates – Publish release notes with a changelog page, in-app widget, and emails
- Integrations – Connects with Slack, Linear, Jira, HubSpot, and more
Pricing: The Free plan includes 1 seat and unlimited support conversations. Paid plans start at $29/seat/month billed annually, or $37/seat/month billed monthly.
Fibi AI Agent costs $0.49 per resolution on paid plans. Features vary by plan, and optional add-ons or usage charges can apply.
Conclusion
Sendbird’s starting price is useful, but your active users, peak connections, and required features determine the plan you’ll actually need. Check all 3 before committing.
For customer support, Featurebase combines your inbox, AI support, help center, and feedback so your team can handle more questions with less manual work.
There’s a Free plan to try it out. 👇
Explore Featurebase’s AI-powered support platform
FAQs
It stays free as long as you log in to the dashboard at least once a year. The Developer plan has its own usage limits, separate from the Pro trial.
Sendbird describes prorated upgrades and downgrades taking effect the following month. Some Pro changes and Enterprise changes require sales assistance, so check your contract’s terms.
No, the listed prices exclude taxes. Allow for any applicable taxes when calculating your final budget.
It adds each app’s highest monthly connection count. Those peaks count even if they happen on different days.
Yes. Someone connected on a phone and a browser can count as 2 connections, and multiple open browser tabs can also increase the count.
