Agora Live Streaming API Cost: Pricing, Tech Specs and Use Cases (2027)

Key takeaways

• Agora bills what each user receives, not what they send. A host who is not watching anyone is billed at the audio rate.
• The video price tier comes from aggregate resolution: two 720p streams on one screen are billed as Full HD.
• Broadcast Streaming viewers cost about half as much as interactive viewers ($1.99 against $3.99 per 1,000 HD minutes), in exchange for more delay.
• The free tier is 10,000 Standard minutes, and an interactive HD minute uses four of them. When it runs out, service stops.
• Recording and pushing to a CDN cost little next to viewer minutes, from $1.49 and $1.99 per 1,000 minutes.
• At list prices Amazon IVS is cheaper for big passive audiences. Agora's case is multi-host interactivity, SDK range and built-in add-ons.

Agora live streaming pricing at a glance

Agora list prices per 1,000 participant minutes, checked 4 November 2026. A signed Agora contract overrides them.

Agora sells live video as two products on one SDK. Interactive Live Streaming is for audiences that take part: they can be invited on stage, react in real time and see the host with almost no delay. Broadcast Streaming is for audiences that mostly watch, at roughly half the viewer price. Hosts pay the same rate on both.

How Agora bills live streaming

Four rules decide almost every Agora invoice, and most surprise bills come from not knowing them.

• You pay for what users receive. Agora prices each user by the video streams they subscribe to. A host who publishes video but watches nobody is billed at the audio rate, and a user who receives audio and video is billed for the video only.
• Resolution is added up. The tier comes from the combined resolution of every stream a user receives at once. One 720p stream is HD. Two 720p streams side by side add up to 1,843,200 pixels, which is Full HD pricing, and a 720p stream plus a 1080p stream lands in 2K.
• Role sets the rate. Hosts and interactive viewers share one price list. Broadcast Streaming viewers get the lower one.
• Seconds are summed, then rounded. Agora tracks usage in seconds and rounds each month's audio and video totals up to the next minute, so short sessions are not rounded up one by one.

Here is how the rules combine for a typical live shopping show: one host, one hour, 1,000 viewers watching in 720p.

The host is a rounding error. Viewer minutes are the bill, which is why the choice between interactive and broadcast viewers, and the resolution they receive, matters far more than anything the host does.

Packages and the free tier

Since 29 August 2025, Agora has put new customers on its free RTC package automatically. All packages count usage in Standard minutes: an audio minute is one Standard minute, an HD minute is four for hosts and interactive viewers and two for Broadcast Streaming viewers, and a Full HD minute is nine and 4.57. Anything beyond a paid package is billed at $0.99 per 1,000 Standard minutes.

The free tier is smaller than it sounds. Ten thousand Standard minutes is 10,000 audio minutes, but only 5,000 minutes of HD video for Broadcast Streaming viewers, 2,500 for interactive viewers and about 1,111 at Full HD. One 30-student live class in 720p uses 7,260 of them. Treat the free package as a test budget and move to a paid one before launch, because paid packages keep streams running when you go over, while the free one cuts them off. Agora also sells top-up minutes, which stay valid for a year.

What the add-ons cost

Two cautions. Agora's main pricing page lists recording from $0.99 per 1,000 minutes, while its Cloud Recording documentation lists the higher per-tier rates above, so confirm which applies to your account. And the 10,000 free minutes do not cover Media Push transcoding.

Agora tech specifications

One caveat on those numbers. Agora ended support for SDK 3.x on 31 December 2024, and its current documentation describes latency only as ultra-low or sub-second, without millisecond figures. Treat the 3.x numbers as a guide and measure your own on the networks your users actually have.

Use cases and what they cost

Agora lists education, remote work, gaming, social apps, live shopping and telehealth as its main uses. These six worked examples use list prices and show where the money goes in each.

Live shopping

One host sells to a large audience that mostly watches. Put viewers on Broadcast Streaming and a one-hour 720p show to 1,000 people costs $119.46, or $239.46 if every viewer is interactive. The exception is live auctions: on a 30-second auction, two seconds of delay is 7 percent of the clock, so bidders need sub-second video. Our Whatnot cost guide prices the full live auction app around that problem.

Social live and co-host battles

PK battles, where two hosts compete for gifts side by side, are where the aggregate resolution rule bites. Two 720p hosts plus 500 interactive viewers who receive both streams cost $270.18 an hour, because each viewer is receiving Full HD worth of pixels. Send viewers two 360p streams instead and the same hour costs $120.18, a 56 percent saving on a phone screen where the difference is hard to see.

Virtual events and panels

Three speakers on a two-hour panel with 5,000 Broadcast Streaming viewers cost $4,797.24 if every viewer receives all three 720p streams, which together count as 2K. Merge the speakers into one 720p stream with Cloud Transcoding and the event costs $1,197.24 plus a small transcoding fee, 75 percent less. For overflow audiences, Media Push can send the same stream to YouTube or your own CDN.

Audio rooms

Audio is cheap. Ten speakers and 2,000 listeners for an hour cost $71.39 with listeners on Broadcast Streaming, or $119.39 if every listener is interactive and can be pulled on stage instantly. A Clubhouse-style app can keep listeners on broadcast and move them to the host role only when they raise a hand. Our Clubhouse clone guide covers the rest of that build.

Live classes

A teacher streaming 720p to 30 interactive students for an hour costs $7.24, since the teacher only hears the students. Twenty such classes a month fit inside the Pro package at $133.99. Agora also sells an Interactive Whiteboard from $1.40 per 1,000 minutes and a ready-made Flexible Classroom from $2.19 per 1,000 minutes, and it lists COPPA among the privacy rules it supports, which matters for under-13 learners.

Telehealth

A 30-minute video visit between a doctor and a patient costs $0.24 in 720p or $0.54 in 1080p, because both sides receive each other's video. The cost is trivial; the compliance is not. Agora says it supports HIPAA, which in practice means signing a business associate agreement with Agora before any patient data flows.

Two more uses round out the list. Games and virtual worlds can use the Unity and Unreal Engine SDKs for voice and live video inside the game, and Agora's Conversational AI platform adds voice agents to a channel from $0.10 per minute.

Monthly costs for four real apps

Per-show costs become real budgets at volume. Here are four apps at a steady monthly load, comparing pay-as-listed rates with the cheapest package that covers the usage.

Packages save between 3 percent and 17 percent at these volumes. Beyond that, Agora says it offers customized pricing and volume discounts, so an app at the live shopping row's scale should be negotiating rather than paying list.

Agora vs Amazon IVS on cost

Amazon IVS is the usual alternative for live video. Here is the same one-hour show to 1,000 viewers on each, at list prices:

For a big audience that only watches, IVS is cheaper. A hundred such shows a month cost about $6,560.00 on IVS low-latency streaming against about $11,618.93 on Agora Broadcast Streaming with its largest package. Agora's case rests on interactivity and breadth: many hosts in one channel, co-hosting across channels, SDKs that include Unity, Unreal Engine, Flutter, React Native and Electron, and add-ons such as captions, translation and voice AI agents. Check IVS real-time's concurrency limits against your biggest show, and ask Agora for volume pricing before you compare final numbers.

How to cut your Agora bill

• Default viewers to Broadcast Streaming. Move them to the interactive or host role only when they join the stage. It halves the HD viewer rate.
• Watch the pixels each viewer receives. Use low-resolution substreams for grids and thumbnails, so multi-host screens stay in the HD tier.
• Merge multi-speaker events into one stream. A transcoded stream costs a little; three full streams to every viewer cost a lot.
• Default to 720p. Full HD costs 2.25 times as much as HD per interactive viewer minute, and 2.31 times for broadcast viewers.
• Use audio where video adds nothing. Audio rooms and podcasts cost a fraction of video.
• Buy a package before launch. The free package suspends service when it runs out; paid packages bill the extra instead.
• Push very large passive audiences to a CDN. Media Push starts at $1.99 per 1,000 minutes, and viewers who do not need to interact can accept CDN delay.

What the rest of the app costs

Video minutes are only the running cost. The app around them, with profiles, chat, gifting or checkout, moderation and an admin panel, is the bigger budget, and our app development cost guide prices it feature by feature. If you would rather start from a finished product, we sell a white label Bigo Live clone with gifting, PK battles and multi-guest rooms for $15,900 one-time, plus $999 for source code, live in about 30 days. Its media layer can run on Agora or on a WebRTC and RTMP media server, so the per-minute costs on this page still apply if you choose Agora. We sell that product, so weigh our view accordingly.

Conclusion

Agora's live streaming API is cheap per minute and easy to overspend on. The bill is driven by viewer minutes, by whether viewers are interactive or broadcast, and by how many pixels each one receives. Get those three right and a 1,000-viewer hour costs about $119.46; get them wrong and a multi-speaker event can cost four times what it should.

Model your own sessions with the rates above, move off the free package before launch, and compare against Amazon IVS if your audience mostly watches. If they take part, with co-hosts, stage invites and real-time reactions, that is the job Agora is built for.

Sources

• Agora pricing overview, Interactive Live Streaming pricing and Broadcast Streaming pricing, checked 4 November 2026.
• Billing rules, Standard minutes, packages and broadcast ratios: Agora's RTC pricing documentation.
• Add-on rates: Agora's Cloud Recording pricing and Media Push pricing documentation.
• Quality, platforms, coverage, compliance and use cases: Agora's video product page. SDK versions: Agora's SDK downloads page.
• Latency, packet loss and capacity figures: Agora's legacy 3.x product overview and capacity FAQ.
• Amazon IVS: pricing and features, checked November 2026.