Sendbird

Sendbird's Starter plan costs $399/month. Up to 5,000 MAU at $349/mo billed annually or $399/mo billed monthly (sendbird.com/pricing/chat, checked 24 Sep 2026). Peak concurrent connections capped at 5% of MAU; overage fees apply above the MAU limit at an unpublished rate. The only printed 10K/25K Starter prices ($499/$1,199) are from a table Sendbird labels June 2021. 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.

On 24 September 2026 Sendbird's Chat pricing page listed Starter at $349/month billed annually or $399/month billed monthly for up to 5,000 monthly active users (MAU), and Pro at $499/month annually or $599/month monthly for the same 5,000 MAU with translation, image moderation and supergroup channels added. Enterprise is custom-priced for millions of MAU, and a free trial covers up to 1,000 MAU with all Pro features (sendbird.com/pricing/chat). The only 10K and 25K MAU prices in that page's text ($499 and $1,199 on Starter, $749 and $1,799 on Pro) sit in a table Sendbird labels June 2021, so ask for a current quote before budgeting above 5,000 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 through your app's client SDK within the past 30 days (sendbird.com/pricing/chat, checked 24 September 2026). Costs therefore scale with how many of your users open chat, not with how many staff you employ. A marketplace app with 5,000 active buyers fits Starter at $349/month on annual billing, but the bill follows the user base: on Sendbird's June 2021 monthly table, Starter went from $399 at 5,000 MAU to $1,199 at 25,000. Sendbird also caps peak concurrent connections at 5% of the MAU limit on Starter and Pro and counts devices rather than users, so a traffic spike can trigger overages even when MAU stays within the plan.

On 24 September 2026 Sendbird's plan cards show one free option: a free trial for up to 1,000 MAU and 20 peak concurrent connections, with all Pro features, no credit card, community support and no overages allowed (sendbird.com/pricing/chat). The FAQ on the same page says a Developer plan stays free as long as you log into the dashboard once a year, but publishes no limits for it. The 100-MAU and 10-connection limits usually quoted come from Sendbird's February 2022 launch post (sendbird.com/blog). Business Messaging has no published free tier; its pricing page is a quote form.

Sendbird's Starter plan at $349/month billed annually comes to $4,188 a year for 5,000 MAU, before the engineering time to integrate the SDKs, customize the UIKit and keep up with version upgrades across iOS, Android and web. Building in-house means running WebSocket infrastructure, message storage, push notification routing, moderation tooling and a client SDK per platform yourself. The Sendbird math gets harder to defend in two cases: when MAU growth pushes you past the 5,000-MAU rung, where the only prices in Sendbird's page text date from 2021, and when the team realizes it is 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. Our Sendbird alternatives guide splits the options into chat SDKs and support inboxes.