$42.24. That is what one seat costs a month on per-minute pricing if someone is in a call eight hours a day, 22 working days a month, at $0.004 a participant-minute. Every flat vs usage video pricing decision comes down to that number, multiplied by how many seats are busy at once, compared with a quote.
The usual advice is that flat licensing gets cheaper somewhere around 100 to 200 concurrent users. That can be true, but stated like that it cannot be checked. This post does the arithmetic from published prices, compares the main buying models at identical usage, and shows what moves the line.
Five ways video infrastructure is sold
Model | What you pay for | Published example (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
Per participant-minute | Each person, each minute connected | |
Per monthly active user | Each person who joins at least one call that month | 8x8 Jitsi as a Service $0.99 per MAU |
Per gigabyte | Data sent from the platform to viewers | Cloudflare Realtime $0.05/GB, first 1,000 GB free |
Platform fee plus included usage | A monthly fee covering a block of minutes, then a meter | LiveKit Cloud $50 for 150,000 minutes; $500 for 1.5 million |
Flat licence | A fixed fee, whatever the usage | Not published by anyone: quoted per customer |
That last row matters. Because flat prices are quoted rather than published, the honest way to compare them is backwards: work out what your usage costs on each meter, and that is the number a flat quote has to beat.
Flat vs usage video pricing: the one equation
A per-minute bill is participant-minutes × rate, and what the meter actually counts matters before any comparison. For a steady workload, it is easier to think in concurrent seats: one person continuously in a call.
One seat, eight hours a day for 22 days, is 10,560 participant-minutes a month. At $0.004 that is $42.24. A flat licence at fee F breaks even at F ÷ $42.24 concurrent seats. Everything else is that equation with different inputs.
Average concurrent participants | Per-minute bill at $0.004 (list) | At $0.0015 (Daily's deepest volume rate) |
|---|---|---|
100 | $4,224 a month | $1,584 a month |
200 | $8,448 a month | $3,168 a month |
500 | $21,120 a month | $7,920 a month |
So "flat gets cheaper at 100 to 200 concurrent" really means: flat wins if the quote is below roughly $4,200 to $8,400 a month at list price, or below $1,600 to $3,200 once a per-minute provider's deepest discount applies. If someone quotes you a crossover in users, ask for the fee behind it and run the division yourself.
Crossover one: per minute vs per user
Per-MAU pricing charges for a person once a month, however much they use it. At $0.99 per MAU against $0.004 per participant-minute, the crossover is:
$0.99 ÷ $0.004 = 247.5 minutes per user per month, a little over four hours.
This one depends on how each person uses the product, not on total volume. An employee in three one-hour meetings a week uses about 13 hours a month: $3.12 per-minute against $0.99 per user, so per-user wins by three times. A patient with one 20-minute consultation a month costs $0.08 per-minute against $0.99 per user, so per-minute wins by twelve times. Same total minutes can go either way depending on whether they come from a few heavy users or many light ones.
Crossover two: per minute vs per gigabyte
Per-gigabyte pricing charges for data leaving the platform, not for people. That makes the crossover depend on how many streams each person receives and how heavy they are.
Assume 600 kbps per received video stream, a typical forwarded bitrate used in our TURN cost model. That is 0.0045 GB per stream-minute, or $0.000225 at $0.05/GB. Against $0.004 per participant-minute:
$0.004 ÷ $0.000225 ≈ 18 received streams per participant.
Below about 18 streams per person, per-gigabyte is cheaper. A four-person call (three streams each) costs about $0.0007 per participant-minute instead of $0.004, close to six times less. A webinar viewer receiving one stream is cheaper still. A 25-tile gallery view is past the line. The assumption carries the result, though: at 1.5 Mbps per stream the crossover falls to about 7 streams. On per-gigabyte pricing, resolution and layout are pricing decisions, the same lesson as resolution-tiered per-minute plans.
Crossover three: a platform fee with minutes included
Hybrid plans sell a block of usage for a fixed fee, then meter what is above it. LiveKit's $50 plan includes 150,000 WebRTC participant-minutes, which would cost $600 at a $0.004 list rate; its $500 plan includes 1.5 million, worth $6,000 at that rate.
Against pure per-minute pricing, the $50 plan pays for itself after 12,500 minutes. Two caveats keep it honest: these plans also meter downstream bandwidth beyond an allowance ($0.12/GB after 250 GB on the $50 plan), and overage minutes are cheap ($0.0005), which makes the comparison above the included block mostly a bandwidth question.
Four things that move the line
Every crossover above is a clean division. Real decisions are messier in four predictable ways.
- Peak versus average. Per-minute bills follow average usage; flat licences and capacity are usually sized for peak. A system that peaks at 200 concurrent but averages 60 runs a per-minute bill of about $2,530 a month, not $8,450. Compare the quote with the average-driven bill, not the peak.
- Discounts. List rates are rarely what large customers pay. Daily's published tiers go to 63% off, which moves every per-minute crossover up by about 2.7 times.
- What the flat price leaves you to run. A flat licence for software you host still leaves servers, egress, relay and storage on your bill. Compare like with like, using what running it yourself actually costs.
- Add-on meters. Recording, composition and transcription are usually metered separately on per-minute plans and may or may not be included in a flat licence. Put them on both sides of the comparison.
And the counterweight: if usage is low, spiky or unproven, per-minute pricing is usually right, whatever the crossover says. There is no idle cost, and you are not committing to capacity you might not need.
Running it on your own numbers
- Measure average concurrent participants and the hours they are active. Note the peak separately.
- Convert to participant-minutes a month, and to monthly active users if per-user pricing is an option.
- Price that usage on each meter at your negotiated rate, adding the add-ons you actually use.
- Put the flat quote next to it, plus whatever the flat option leaves you to run.
- Repeat at your expected volume a year from now. The crossover that matters is the one you are heading towards.
The Bottom Line
Flat vs usage video pricing has no universal crossover, only an equation: a flat fee breaks even at the fee divided by what one busy seat costs on the meter, $42.24 a month at $0.004 for eight hours a day. Per-user pricing wins above about four hours per person per month, and per-gigabyte pricing wins while each person receives fewer than about 18 streams at 600 kbps. Run the division with your own average usage, not your peak, before believing any quoted threshold.
What's Next
Minutes are only one line of the bill. What your video bill actually adds up to puts minutes, egress, recording, relay and storage into one total for one worked example.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is flat licensing cheaper than per-minute video pricing?
Only above a certain usage. At $0.004 per participant-minute, one participant in calls eight hours a day for 22 days costs $42.24 a month, so a flat licence is cheaper once your average concurrent participants exceed the licence fee divided by $42.24. Below that, per-minute is cheaper.
At what point does flat vs usage video pricing cross over?
Divide the flat monthly fee by the per-minute cost of one busy seat. At list price, 100 average concurrent participants cost $4,224 a month and 200 cost $8,448, so a flat quote below those figures wins at that usage. Volume discounts raise the crossover.
What is per-MAU pricing for video?
Per monthly active user pricing charges once for each person who joins at least one call in a month, regardless of how long they use it. At $0.99 per MAU against $0.004 per minute, it is cheaper for anyone using more than 247.5 minutes a month.
Is per-GB video pricing cheaper than per-minute?
For small calls and broadcasts, usually yes. At $0.05/GB and 600 kbps per stream, per-gigabyte pricing is cheaper until each participant receives about 18 streams. Higher bitrates bring that point down, so large high-resolution galleries can be cheaper per minute.
Should I compare a flat licence against peak or average usage?
Against average. Per-minute bills follow average usage, while a flat licence is a fixed cost whatever the usage. Comparing a flat quote with a peak-based per-minute estimate overstates the savings.
What does flat licensing for video usually include?
It varies, so ask. A flat licence for software you deploy may cover the media platform but not the servers, egress, relay or storage it runs on. Samvyo, based on SFU architecture, is offered with flat licensing and keeps the media path, TURN and recording on infrastructure you control, so those running costs sit on your own cloud bill and should be added to the comparison.
