Sendbird

Sendbird's Starter plan costs $399/month. Up to 5,000 MAU at $349/mo annual ($399/mo monthly); 10K MAU is $499/mo annual, 25K MAU is $1,199/mo annual; overage fees apply above each tier For comparison, Converge costs $49/month flat for up to 15 team members.

Sendbird is best suited for developers building custom in-app messaging experiences. Its standout feature is comprehensive sdk with voice, video, and messaging.

There are 49+ platforms you can compare with Sendbird in the messaging api platform category. Each comparison above shows detailed feature and pricing differences to help you choose.

Sendbird's Chat API starts at $349/month on annual billing ($399/month if billed monthly) for the Starter plan, which covers up to 5,000 Monthly Active Users (sendbird.com, 2026). Pro is $499/month annual ($599/month monthly) for the same 5K MAU with translation, data export, image moderation, and supergroup channels added. Prices step up at higher MAU brackets — Starter is $499/mo at 10K MAU and $1,199/mo at 25K MAU, while Pro is $749/mo at 10K MAU and $1,799/mo at 25K MAU (sendbird.com, 2026). Enterprise is custom pricing for 100K+ MAU. A 30-day free trial unlocks all Pro features at 1,000 MAU.

Sendbird charges by Monthly Active User (MAU), not per agent or seat. An MAU is any end user who connects to Sendbird's servers from your application's Client SDK within a rolling 30-day window (sendbird.com, 2026). This is the opposite of per-seat support tools — costs scale with how many of your end users open your app's chat, not with how many internal agents you employ. The model fits product teams whose chat usage is bounded (a marketplace app with 5K active buyers fits Starter for $349/mo), but penalizes consumer products that grow their active user base — moving from 5K to 25K MAU on Pro is a 3.6× price jump from $499/mo to $1,799/mo. Sendbird also caps Peak Concurrent Connections at 5% of your MAU limit on Starter and Pro, so spike events can trigger overages even when MAU stays within tier.

Sendbird has two free options that get confused. The Developer plan is free forever and covers up to 100 MAU with 20 peak concurrent connections and community-only support — your account stays active as long as you log into the dashboard at least once per year (sendbird.com, 2026). The 30-day free trial sits on top of that and unlocks Pro features (message search, translation, image moderation, supergroup channels) at 1,000 MAU for the first month, then automatically reverts to the 100-MAU Developer plan unless you upgrade. Neither tier includes data export, which is Pro-only — meaning you cannot bulk-export your chat history off Sendbird while on the free plan. There is no free tier of Sendbird's Business Messaging or Calls products.

Sendbird's Starter plan at $349/month annual works out to roughly $4,188/year for 5,000 MAU, plus engineering time to integrate the SDKs, customize the UIKit, and maintain version upgrades across iOS, Android, and web. Building in-house typically requires WebSocket infrastructure, message storage, push notification routing, moderation tooling, and SDK maintenance across each client platform — most teams underestimate this at 4–8 engineer-months for parity with Sendbird's baseline feature set, before any moderation or compliance work. The Sendbird math becomes harder to defend in two scenarios: when MAU growth crosses the $1,199/mo (25K MAU) Starter tier or $1,799/mo (25K MAU) Pro tier, and when the team realizes they're using Sendbird to build a customer support inbox rather than in-app messaging. For pure support use cases — aggregating WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Discord, email, and a website widget — a dedicated support inbox is a closer fit than a chat API. See our Sendbird comparison hub for full alternatives, or compare against another CPaaS at Twilio Flex pricing.