Help with livestreaming social app. Video SDK (Twilio, Agora, etc) too expensive

[pearlgate]

Hi, we are two GenZ cofounders (24 and 21) building the first study stream platform in Southeast Asia to help young professionals focus and feel less lonely. Check us out at: www.lean.social

Our biggest struggle right now is our video streaming infrastructure and its prohibitive cost. We are using P2P WebRTC and each video room has a limit of 5 participants. There is no cost but it's very limiting and low-performance.

If we wanted more, we have 2 options:

1/ Buy a video sdk server plan (Twilio, Daily.co, Agora, Amazon Chime, etc):

- The cheapest these can get is 0.0015$ per participant minute. Without scale it is 0.004$/participant minute

- This is prohibitively expensive for us with limited funding. 1000 users using our service for 2 hours daily is a 10$k bill montly

Is there any more affordable providers? How much of the cost can we save if:

- We increase the latency to 10-15s? Real-time is not important for us

- We Reduce the video resolution to super low ~ 240p? Our video frame is very small to increase focus

2/ Build our own self-hosted server:

- We are leaning towards open-source projects like LiveKit (seems better) and Jitsi. We plan to host the instances on AWS because of our CTO's familiarity with its infrastructure.

Has anyone tried building B2C social apps with video calls from open-source projects like these? Could you share:

- How much does self-hosting on aws would save us?

- How deeply can we customize their UI? We don't do anything like the usual video conferencing layout. We want to build our own layout which is vastly different.

 

[phoenixmod]

@pearlgate Look into elixir and Phoenix view. I can't speak on performance, but I do know a colleague who's been able to scale a service similar to this without breaking the bank.

 

[ireneh]

@pearlgate What is the difference to Zoom, MS Teams, Facetime and Discord? That you can sit virtually together with other people and learn? I would feel awkward and creepy if someone would just watch me learning. Is there a market for this? Did you talk to user? If yes, one suggestion: You should use self created videos from yourself or friends to make it look like there are a lot of users. You don't have to integrate just live people. But only if there is no interaction planed.

 

[jmzr]

@pearlgate I use Janus Gateway for my WebRTC video streams @ https://printnanny.ai/ - it costs around $10/month for 1 VM.

The unit economics of premium/managed streaming services might not work out if your audience is consumers on a student budget.

 

[ladyestellarose]

@pearlgate check out Mux - it’s a YC company and they make video APIs

 

[paulafloyd]

@pearlgate One approach, if you are using open-source projects and hosting your own server, is to put a limit on the max bitrate of audio and video. This will reduce your costs. With some work, you can avoid a noticeable drop in audio and video quality.

By making changes to the open source client SDK you use, you can set bitrate limits, for example 10kbps for audio (which is mostly speech in your case?) and 50kbps for video (may need some more work in the SDK) and still have good quality audio and video.

Such a low bitrate will cost you much less than 0.001$ per participant minute. And this approach could work even if you use a hosted SFU that charges per GBs of data transferred (e.g Livekit cloud), instead of per participant minutes.

 

[melissa2016]

@pearlgate Why not just use webRTC? It’s completely free. Requires a bit more work to set up but also gives more control.

 

[jimbeta]

@pearlgate Email the CEO of Daily, they sometimes offer startups credits

 

[matthew2414]

@pearlgate Checkout Dyte for live streaming, it is YC-backed too.

Btw, Twilio Video is out of the question now, Twilio just announced that they are shutting shop.