Build massive-scale, real-time video and audio experiences

Hey Product Hunt 👋

When the pandemic started, I worked on a side project building “Clubhouse for companies”. Like Clubhouse, I built it using Agora for the audio. Pinterest wanted to buy 500 seats, but told me for security reasons, I had to use an alternative to Agora. I started to look at open source options, and quickly realized there wasn’t a modern stack with good mobile support. I mentioned this to my longtime friend, David, and he offered to help me build an open source WebRTC stack in Go, which I could use in my side project. We didn’t realize how hard or fun it would be, and I eventually forgot all about that Pinterest deal.

A little over a year ago, we launched LiveKit, a modern, open source, end-to-end WebRTC stack. It made it easy to build real-time video and audio features into browser, desktop or mobile apps. Shortly after our launch, we became the fastest growing WebRTC repo on GitHub and 100s of projects were using LiveKit.

While many developers were running LiveKit in production, others found it challenging to operate their own media infrastructure or just wanted to focus on their products.

We built LiveKit Cloud to make building, deploying and scaling real-time video and audio features, simple.

Cloud is a WebRTC platform operated by the LiveKit team. It uses the same LiveKit open source SFU, APIs and SDKs. You can even switch between Cloud and your self-hosted stack without changing any code. What’s different about Cloud is a custom orchestration layer, allowing it to support massive scale experiences.

For example, with Cloud, you could build a 5v5 version of Twitch, with all 10 players’ games streaming simultaneously to a 100,000 person virtual arena. With only 100ms of latency between anyone. What’s more is, you can build it about as easily as an app for 1:1 meetings. Cloud does the hard work for you!

LiveKit Cloud has a generous monthly free tier and then a pay-as-you-go model afterwards. An incredibly detailed analytics and telemetry system is also free for all projects. David and I are excited for you to give it a whirl and look forward to your questions and feedback.

Russ