Sendbird pricing

About

Sendbird sells a customer-communications API platform: in-app chat, voice and video calling, omnichannel business messaging, moderation tooling, a support agent desk, and — under a separate delight.ai brand — an AI customer-service agent. Its own comparison page claims 4,000+ apps, 145K developers, 6 billion+ end users and 7 billion+ messages, and it markets primarily to engineering and product teams who would otherwise build a messaging layer themselves. The named references skew toward consumer apps operating at large concurrency: Hinge, Redfin, Accolade, Carousell, Virgin Mobile and Ahold Delhaize all appear on the pricing and comparison surfaces.

Founded in 2013 and a Y Combinator W16 company, Sendbird raised a $52M Series B in February 2019 and a $100M Series C in April 2021 led by Steadfast, at a reported valuation of about $1.05 billion — making it one of the few chat-infrastructure vendors to reach unicorn status. Third-party trackers put revenue in the $40M ARR range and headcount in the high-200s to low-300s, though Sendbird does not publish either. It is headquartered in San Mateo with offices in Seoul and Singapore.

The pricing estate is unusually fragmented for a company this size. There is no /pricing hub — that URL returns a hard 404 — and the three products behind the Chat / Business Messaging / Calls tab strip are three separate pages running three genuinely different monetization models. Chat is a tiered subscription priced off monthly active users; Calls is pure per-minute usage drawn from prepaid credits; Business Messaging publishes nothing at all and routes to a quote form.

The competitive frame has moved twice in two years. On the chat-API surface, Sendbird’s named rival is Stream, which gets a dedicated /stream-comparison page carrying a side-by-side price table and a migration offer (“discount from your current contract, free business messaging credits, migration services by Sendbird engineers”). On the AI surface, the comparison set on delight.ai is entirely different — Decagon, Sierra, Fin, Ada, Cresta and Avoca — which is a customer-service AI field, not an infrastructure one. Sendbird is effectively running two go-to-markets against two competitive sets from two domains, and only one of them publishes prices.

Pricing summary : MAU-tiered chat, prepaid per-minute calls, quote-only messaging

Sendbird does not have one pricing model — it has three, one per product line, and they do not share a meter, a cadence, or a purchase path. Chat is a hybrid model: a flat monthly platform fee chosen from a six-step monthly-active-user ladder, plus overage fees once you exceed the soft caps on that tier. Calls is pure usage billed per minute against a prepaid credit balance. Business Messaging and the delight.ai AI agent publish no prices whatsoever.

The billing dimensions actually in play:

• Monthly active users (MAU) — the primary Chat meter. Sendbird’s own FAQ defines it as a user “counted as an active user when they connect to Sendbird servers by using the Client SDK from your application, within the past 30 days,” and the comparison table footnotes usage as counted “per website or mobile app.” This is the axis the whole active-user pricing page is built on: the slider steps are 1K, 5K, 10K, 25K, 50K and 100K+, and each step reprices Starter, Pro and the bundled offer.
• Peak concurrent connections (PC) — a second, softer capacity meter, capped at “5% of MAU” on Starter and Pro and at 20 on the free trial. It counts devices, not people: two devices on one account is two connections, and an open browser tab keeps counting. Multi-app organizations have their per-app peaks summed.
• Minutes — the Calls meter, split six ways by voice vs video, peer-to-peer vs server-relayed, and communication vs cloud recording, from $0.0010 to $0.0059 per minute.
• Prepaid credits — the settlement unit for Calls. A credit is “a pre-paid monetary equivalent… The standard price of a credit is $1.00 US, however volume discounts apply,” sold in vouchers of “any size over a value of $1.00 US.”
• In-app messages — the Business Messaging meter, visible only as the bundled allowance on Chat plans (30K free in-app messages at 5K MAU, scaling to 600K at 100K+).
• Support level — Base, Silver, Gold and Platinum are purchasable tiers, bought from inside the dashboard rather than quoted by sales.
• Billing cadence — annual commitment is the default headline price; monthly billing carries a visible premium on every published tier.

What makes this different: most API platforms with a usage meter show you the overage rate. Sendbird shows the meter, the tier ceiling, the soft cap and the warning (“Overages may apply”, “you will be charged an overage fee”) but never the per-unit overage price — so the published price tells you your floor and gives you no way to model your ceiling.

Pricing by product

Chat (published plans, at the 5,000 MAU slider step)

Chat (the MAU ladder — same two plans, repriced per step)

The 50K and 100K+ steps keep the “Overages may apply” line but replace both the price and the “Start free trial” button with “Contact sales” — the self-serve path ends at 25K MAU.

Chat capacity limits (from the “Compare features” table)

*Verbatim page footnote: “Usage per website or mobile app. Overages may apply.” The table’s own key reads ” : Included”, ” + : Included and more available for additional fee”, “Custom: Available as an Add-on” — so a ”+” row (moderation, translation, analytics, customer success manager) is entitled at the plan level but metered or upsold beyond it.

Calls (separate product — pure per-minute usage)

Page footnote, verbatim: “Standard pricing in USD. Volume discounts apply.” Calls is prepaid: you buy a voucher — “a set of credits with an expiration date… any size over a value of $1.00 US” — and “the standard price of a credit is $1.00 US, however volume discounts apply.” Sendbird states you “need a positive account at all times for calls to operate,” warns at 80% consumption and before expiry, and rolls unused credits over on auto-recharge “unless the new credit voucher you buy is smaller.” HIPAA on Calls is available as an add-on.

Business Messaging (separate product — no published prices)

AI agent — delight.ai (separate product and brand — no published prices)

A public ROI calculator at /ai-agent/roi-calculator takes tickets/month, agent headcount, annual cost per agent and an optional helpdesk seat fee, and returns a modelled 3-year saving. Its “Sendbird annual cost” line is a calculator output derived from your inputs, not a published rate card — no AI-agent list price is disclosed anywhere on the site.

Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for the Chat free trial and the Starter and Pro plans up to the 25K MAU step (dashboard signup, no credit card, dashboard-driven upgrade/downgrade and support-tier purchase); sales-led for Chat at 50K MAU and above, all Enterprise Chat, Business Messaging, and the delight.ai AI agent.

Hidden costs : MAU overages, device-counted connections, and unpriced products

Sendbird’s hidden costs are unusual because the largest one is not a rate you can look up and forget — it is a rate that does not exist in public at all. The page tells you there is an overage (“Overages may apply”, “you will be charged an overage fee”) and never tells you what it is. Everything below the line is therefore split into what you can compute and what only a quote can answer.

Archetype 1: a marketplace app at 25,000 MAU running chat plus in-app voice and video

A two-sided marketplace on Pro at the 25K MAU slider step, billed annually, with 40,000 minutes of peer-to-peer voice, 6,000 minutes of server-relayed video, and cloud recording on the video for compliance.

The published numbers give you a floor and nothing else. Note the shape of the risk: at 25,000 MAU the peak-connection allowance is 1,250 devices, and Sendbird’s own FAQ warns that “if a user connects to Sendbird Chat from two devices, this counts as 2 concurrent connections” and that an open browser tab keeps counting. A single web-heavy traffic spike can therefore breach a meter you never budgeted for, at a price you cannot look up — the classic setup for bill shock and cost unpredictability. Organizations running several apps have it worse: peak connections are summed across every app in the organization, so a quiet app’s spike lands on the same bill as the busy one.

Archetype 2: a 40-agent support org adopting the delight.ai AI agent

The same exercise on the AI side produces a table that cannot be filled in.

The only quantified artifact Sendbird offers here is the ROI calculator, which emits a “Sendbird annual cost” line derived from your own ticket volume and agent-cost inputs without ever disclosing the rate that produced it. That is a savings model, not a rate card — and it is worth reading as an argument rather than a quote. Third-party procurement data is the only external anchor: Vendr’s marketplace listing, drawn from anonymized Sendbird transactions, reports an average and median contract value of $10,900 per year with a low-to-high band of $4,802 to $98,278. Treat that as a distribution of past deals, not a price.

One genuine cost floor is worth flagging on the Calls side: credits are prepaid and expire, and auto-recharge only rolls over surplus “unless the new credit voucher you buy is smaller.” Buying down your voucher after a quiet quarter silently forfeits the balance — a mechanic worth understanding before you commit, and one we cover generally in the guide to prepaid credit models.

Want to estimate your own Sendbird bill? Use the Sendbird pricing calculator to model your monthly cost based on MAU tier, peak concurrent connections, and Calls minutes.

Pricing evolution : A decade of publishing, withdrawing, and republishing prices

Sendbird’s ten-year price history has one dominant shape: it publishes a rate card, withdraws it when the go-to-market turns enterprise, and republishes a thinner one later. It has now done this twice — with Chat between 2016 and 2020, and with the AI product between 2024 and 2025. Both times the thing that disappeared first was the overage rate.

Cadence

Tracked range: 2016 Q1 – 2026 Q3. Quarters not listed above were verified stable (0 price changes, 0 SKU additions) or had no archived snapshot in the range.

Notable changes

• 2016-03-05 — Named ladder with published overage rates: Sprout $49/month, Tree $179/month, Park $599/month, and per-user overages of $0.012, $0.011 and $0.010 respectively. This is the only period in the tracked range where a buyer could compute the cost of an overrun.
• 2016-10-25 — All published prices removed. The page becomes “FREE” plus “CUSTOM PRICING — A full chat experience for businesses. CONTACT US.” The MAU definition is rewritten from message-based to connection-based in the same window.
• 2018-10-30 — Free-plan enforcement is stated explicitly for the first time: on breaching 1,000 MAU or 25 peak connections, “if you do not contact us within three days, your users will not be able to login until you upgrade.”
• 2020-06-17 — Published self-serve pricing returns after roughly four years: Starter 5K at $399/month, Pro 5K at $799/month, Enterprise custom, peak connections at 2% of MAU. Chat, Calls and Desk become three products; the customer success manager is gated at “$50k in ARR.”
• 2021-04-06 — Sendbird announces a $100M Series C led by Steadfast at a reported valuation of about $1.05B. In the same quarter the struck-through list prices on the pricing cards disappear and the discounted figures become the standing rates.
• 2021-08-16 — The “Latest Sendbird pricing (June, 2021)” FAQ table first appears, quoting 5K MAU at $399/$599, 10K at $499/$749 and 25K at $1,199/$1,799. It has not been edited since; it is still on sendbird.com/pricing/chat in September 2026, contradicting the live slider directly above it.
• 2022-05-11 — Peak concurrent connections loosen from 2% of MAU to 5% of MAU on Starter and Pro, and a Developer free plan (100 MAU, 10 peak connections, “No overages allowed”) joins the ladder. Both changes are effectively free capacity at unchanged prices.
• 2023-03-25 — Pro at 5,000 MAU is cut from $799/month to $599/month, a 25% reduction and the only outright headline price cut in the tracked range. Starter holds at $399.
• 2024-05-30 — Sendbird publishes an AI rate card for the first and so far only time: AI Chatbot Starter at $99/month for 10,000 message credits, Pro at $499/month for 50,000, an overage of “$5… for every 1,000 message credit”, and a model-weighted credit table.
• 2024-12-06 — The free tier is renamed from Developer to Free trial and its MAU allowance grows tenfold, from 100 to 1,000, with peak connections doubling from 10 to 20.
• 2025-04-17 — The AI Chatbot ladder and its published overage rate are gone. The default tab of sendbird.com/pricing becomes an unpriced AI Agent page selling “consumption-based pricing” and “custom quotes.”
• 2025-11-18 — Delight.ai launches as a separate brand and domain for the AI agent (PR Newswire, San Mateo, Calif.). sendbird.com/ai-agent and sendbird.com/careers now redirect there.
• 2025-11-29 — Chat prices are restated as annual-versus-monthly: $349 versus $399 for Starter 5K, $499 versus $599 for Pro 5K. The monthly figures are unchanged from 2023, so this is a roughly 12.5% annual-commitment discount rather than a price cut.

The disappearing overage rate in detail

The single most consequential thing in Sendbird’s price history is not a number that moved — it is a number that stopped being printed.

In March 2016 the pricing page answered the question “what happens if my app’s popularity explodes and I go beyond the Chat MAU quota?” with an actual price: “you will be charged $0.012/user with Sprout pricing, $0.011/user with Tree pricing, $0.010/user with Park pricing, and even lower with Enterprise pricing.” A buyer could multiply. By October 2016 the plan prices themselves had been withdrawn, and when the ladder came back in June 2020 the overage answer had been reduced to a warning: “we will inform you before you are getting close to hitting your MAU limit. After you hit your MAU limit, you will be charged an overage fee.” That is the wording still live in September 2026, verbatim, ten years after the rate stopped being published.

The same pattern repeats in miniature on the AI side. The May 2024 AI Chatbot page published “$5 overage fee will be applied for every 1,000 message credit” — a clean, computable rate. Eleven months later that page and its rate were gone, replaced by a lead form. Both times the sequence was identical: publish a rate, grow into enterprise deals, withdraw the rate.

The practical consequence for a buyer is asymmetric. Sendbird publishes a precise floor (you can price Starter 5K to the dollar) and an unbounded ceiling (nobody outside the sales conversation can price a 20% MAU overrun). Third-party teardowns fill the vacuum with figures — roughly $5 per additional concurrent connection, roughly $0.08 to $0.15 per additional MAU are the numbers that circulate — but none of them are sourced to Sendbird and several originate from competitors. We could not corroborate any of them against a Sendbird surface, current or archived, and have deliberately not repeated them as fact. The honest statement is that Sendbird’s overage rate is unknown to the public, and that its own archive shows it did not have to be.

The AI-chatbot credit table contradicted itself

Worth recording because it is the kind of defect a published rate card exposes and a quote-only motion hides. In the May 2024 AI Chatbot page, the footnote read “10 message credits apply to 1 bot message for GPT-4-turbo and Claude 2.1.” By December 2024 the footnote had been changed to “2 message credits to 1 bot message for GPT-4-turbo and Claude 2.1” — while the comparison table on the very same page still listed “GPT-4-turbo: 10 message credits / bot message” and added “Claude 3 Sonnet: 3 message credits / bot message.” A customer reading the footnote and a customer reading the table would have budgeted five times apart for the same workload. The multiplier discipline that credit-based billing demands is exactly this: one number, one place.

What’s unique : Two meters, three models, and a brand split down the middle

1. A second capacity meter that counts devices, not people. Almost every active-user-priced vendor in the corpus meters one thing. Sendbird meters two, and the second one is not measured in the same unit as the first. Peak Concurrent Connections is capped at 5% of your MAU limit, but a connection is a device: “if a user connects to Sendbird Chat from two devices, this counts as 2 concurrent connections. This also includes when the users connect from a website and the tab is still open.” A multi-device consumer product can breach a 5% connection cap while sitting comfortably inside its MAU tier. Organizations with several apps have their per-app peaks summed — Sendbird’s own worked example adds 23 and 50 to reach 73 for the month. The result is a capacity ceiling denominated in browser tabs.

2. Three genuinely different monetization models under one roof, with no shared meter. Chat is a hybrid MAU-tier subscription with soft caps; Calls is pure usage drawn from prepaid $1.00 credits; Business Messaging is sales-only. There is no unified balance, no cross-product credit pool, and no single invoice narrative. A customer running all three reconciles a monthly subscription, a depleting prepaid voucher and a negotiated contract — three different questions for a finance team, from one vendor.

3. Bundled value stated as a price the customer never pays. Every Chat card carries a “PLATFORM OFFER” panel quoting a dollar figure — “$122/month value” at 5K MAU, rising to “$2,345/month value” at 100K+ — for Business Messaging in-app messages included free. It is the only place Sendbird attaches a number to Business Messaging at all. The list price of the bundled product is disclosed; the list price of the product itself is not. That inverts the usual pattern, where the standalone rate is public and the bundle discount is negotiated.

4. The rate card that outlived the product. The Calls rate card is the most stable artifact in this entire history: peer-to-peer voice at $0.0010 per minute per user and video at $0.0014 are byte-identical in the August 2021 archive and the September 2026 live page, with server-relayed at $0.0015 and $0.0035 equally frozen. Cloud recording joined in 2023 at $0.0014 and $0.0059 and has not moved since. In a corpus where AI-era vendors reprice quarterly, a five-year-flat per-minute rate card is genuinely unusual.

5. Pricing that lives on two domains. Sendbird is the only company in this corpus whose pricing estate spans two brands. Chat, Calls and Business Messaging price on sendbird.com; the AI agent prices — or rather declines to price — on delight.ai, where delight.ai/pricing redirects to an educational blog article about AI-agent pricing models that contains no Delight.ai prices. The AI product is sold against Decagon, Sierra, Fin, Ada, Cresta and Avoca, while the chat product is sold against Stream. Two brands, two competitive sets, two transparency postures.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : Dashboard self-service, prepaid vouchers, email-only invoicing

• “How many MAU?” slider on the pricing page — a six-step range control (1K / 5K / 10K / 25K / 50K / 100K+) that reprices every plan card in place. It is the single most useful billing control Sendbird ships, because it converts an abstract tier ladder into a direct answer. Its ceiling is also a disclosure boundary: past 25K the prices stop.
• Chat subscription change from the dashboard — Sendbird documents the exact path: organization name → General → Change within the Chat subscription section. “Starter and some Pro plans are effective immediately. If upgrading, the price will be prorated based on the remaining number of days within the month. If downgrading, your new plan will take effect the following month.” Some Pro plans and all Enterprise plans instead prompt a Contact-sales handoff.
• Self-serve cancellation, with a non-refund term attached — the same General → Change panel exposes “Cancel subscription”, behind a short exit-survey question and a type-your-organization-name confirmation. Sendbird states plainly that “any payments that have already been made are non-refundable” under section 11 (Fees & payment) of its Terms of Service.
• Purchasable support tiers — Base, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Per the FAQ, “You can purchase higher levels of support from within the Sendbird dashboard” — support is a self-serve SKU, not a sales negotiation. Starter and Pro are recommended Base or Silver at 8x5 ticket availability; Enterprise is Gold or Platinum at 24x7, with Slack support “Included in Platinum”.
• MAU soft caps with advance warning — “We will inform you before you are getting close to hitting your MAU limit. After you hit your MAU limit, you will be charged an overage fee.” The FAQ also nudges the upgrade explicitly: “When nearing MAU limits, it’s recommended you upgrade to the next MAU tier to get better discounts.” The overage rate itself is never shown.
• Calls prepaid credit balance with an 80% alert — Calls runs on a positive-balance requirement: “You need a positive account at all times for calls to operate.” Sendbird notifies “on your dashboard and email account before your credits expire at the end of a billing cycle or when you have used 80% of your available credits.”
• Calls auto-recharge with a rollover catch — auto-billing is a dashboard toggle: “With auto-recharge on, unused credits will rollover unless the new credit voucher you buy is smaller.” Buying down your voucher size silently forfeits the surplus.
• Card management in-app, invoicing by email — credit/debit card details are added and updated under organization name → Billing in the dashboard, but everything else is a manual email loop to [email protected]: copies of current or past invoices, re-charging an invoice, receiving a payment link, switching between card and wire payment, US tax residency certificates, and adding a VAT ID to an invoice. There is no self-serve invoice history described anywhere on the pricing surfaces.
• Tax handled downstream — “Tax is not included in the prices listed on the pricing page. Tax will be included in your billing receipts,” so every advertised figure is pre-tax.
• Free-plan dormancy rule — the free Developer plan “remains active as long as you log into the Sendbird dashboard once a year,” an unusually explicit and lenient inactivity term.
• Public ROI calculator as a pre-sales billing tool — /ai-agent/roi-calculator models 3-year savings from tickets/month, agent count, annual cost per agent and helpdesk seat fee. It outputs a “Sendbird annual cost” line without ever disclosing the rate that produced it.

Strategic wins : The decisions that survived a decade of repricing

1. Republishing prices in 2020 after four sales-only years

Between October 2016 and June 2020 Sendbird’s pricing page said “Custom pricing — Contact us.” Putting Starter 5K at $399 and Pro 5K at $799 back on the page in June 2020 was the move that made the product self-serve again, and it landed just as competitors like Stream were building their whole positioning on published rates. The company then held that structure through a $1B-valuation Series C and a full AI pivot. Choosing a value metric a developer can self-assess before signing up — see choosing the right usage metric — is what makes a bottom-up motion possible at all, and Sendbird proved it can be reversed back in.

2. Picking MAU over seats, then never wavering

Sendbird has metered monthly active users continuously since 2016, through two brand changes, six product launches and three go-to-market pivots. It never tried per-seat, per-message or per-channel as the headline meter. For an embedded chat SDK that is the right call — the customer’s own product has users, not seats, so the vendor’s bill scales with the customer’s success rather than their org chart. It is also why Sendbird was structurally ready when the industry started moving off per-user licenses: it was never on them.

3. Cutting Pro 25% instead of adding a tier

In early 2023 Sendbird faced the usual mid-market squeeze and responded by cutting Pro at 5,000 MAU from $799 to $599 — a straight 25% reduction — rather than inserting a new tier between Starter and Pro. Adding a tier would have complicated the ladder and diluted the meaning of “Pro”; cutting the price kept the ladder at four cards and made the Starter-to-Pro upgrade a $200 decision instead of a $400 one. Three and a half years later that monthly rate is still the standing price, which suggests the repricing found the right level.

4. Giving away capacity instead of discounting price

Twice Sendbird has increased what a plan includes without touching what it costs: peak concurrent connections went from 2% to 5% of MAU in 2022, and the free tier’s MAU allowance went from 100 to 1,000 in 2024. Both are real economic concessions that never appeared as a price cut, which means neither reset the anchor for existing customers or invited a renegotiation at renewal. Loosening an entitlement is a quieter lever than dropping a price, and it is one more pricing teams should reach for — the mechanics are covered in the guide to entitlements and usage grants.

5. Making zero seat fees the AI product’s headline

Sendbird’s AI positioning is not “cheaper AI” — it is “your helpdesk seats are free.” Bundling Sendbird Desk with the AI agent and leading with “Skip the monthly agent seat fees. Desk is included” attacks the specific line item that makes incumbent helpdesk software expensive at scale, and does it without publishing a competing number. It is a well-chosen wedge into a category where the buyer’s existing bill is a per-agent subscription, and it lines up with the broader move toward outcome-oriented AI pricing that the rest of the corpus is converging on.

Areas to improve : The overage rate, the stale table, and the missing hub

1. Publish the overage rate — you already did once

Sendbird names the penalty on four surfaces and never names its size. “Overages may apply” appears on every paid card; “you will be charged an overage fee” appears in the FAQ; “No overages allowed” appears on the free trial. The number appears nowhere. This is the single largest gap on the page, and the fix is not hypothetical: the March 2016 page published $0.012, $0.011 and $0.010 per user by tier and nothing bad happened. Concrete fix: restore a per-MAU and per-peak-connection overage rate to the comparison table, even as a band (“$0.0X–$0.0Y per MAU above tier, decreasing with tier”). A buyer who can price the downside of a traffic spike is a buyer who signs; a buyer who cannot is a buyer who goes and reads a competitor’s teardown instead — which is exactly what is happening, and those teardowns are filling the gap with numbers Sendbird did not choose.

2. Delete the “Latest Sendbird pricing (June, 2021)” table

A FAQ answer on the live 2026 pricing page quotes 10K MAU at $499 Starter and $749 Pro. The slider on the same page, roughly two screens above, quotes 10K MAU at $519 and $699 billed monthly. The table has been byte-identical since at least the August 2021 archive. It is now a five-year-old artifact actively contradicting the live product on the same URL, and it is the first thing a diligent buyer will screenshot and bring to the negotiation. Concrete fix: delete it. If a summary table is wanted, generate it from the same data that drives the slider so the two cannot drift.

3. Give the pricing estate a hub

sendbird.com/pricing returns HTTP 404, which means the most obvious URL a buyer, a journalist or an AI search engine will try is a dead end. The three live tabs are three separate pages, the AI product prices on a different domain, and /pricing/ai-chatbot and /pricing/live are also 404s with no redirect to a successor. Concrete fix: make /pricing a real hub that summarizes all four monetization models in one view and links out, and 301 the retired product URLs to their nearest live equivalent rather than dropping them. Cross-product pricing comprehension is a solved problem — Vercel and Intercom both do it — and the cost of not doing it is that no single page can be cited as “Sendbird’s pricing.”

4. Stop describing two different meters with one word

MAU and Peak Concurrent Connections are both presented as “usage,” but one counts humans over 30 days and the other counts devices at an instant. The 5%-of-MAU relationship implies they are commensurable when they are not: a customer whose users each keep a phone app and a browser tab open is structurally at 2x the connection load per MAU of one whose users are mobile-only. Concrete fix: put a worked example next to the peak-connection row on the comparison table, the way the FAQ already does for multi-app aggregation, and let buyers self-diagnose whether the 5% cap fits their client mix before they sign rather than after they breach it.

5. Publish at least a floor for the AI agent

The delight.ai product publishes no price, offers no free trial, and hands the buyer an ROI calculator that outputs a “Sendbird annual cost” line without ever disclosing the rate behind it. That combination asks the buyer to accept a savings argument before seeing a cost. Meanwhile Sendbird’s own recent past shows a working alternative: the 2024 AI Chatbot page published $99 and $499 tiers and a $5-per-1,000-credit overage. Concrete fix: publish a starting price or a per-resolution band for the AI agent, even if enterprise remains quoted. Competitors in the same comparison set increasingly do, and a page that names no number cannot be cited by the AI search surfaces that now mediate this category’s discovery.

Key takeaways

1. A published floor without a published ceiling is only half a price. Sendbird prices Starter 5K to the dollar and leaves the overage rate blank, so a buyer can compute the best case and nothing else. If your model has an overage, publishing the rate is not a concession — it is what converts an anchored price into a budgetable one.
2. Two meters need two explanations. Sendbird’s second meter counts devices while the first counts humans, and the “5% of MAU” framing hides the mismatch. Any time a secondary cap is expressed as a percentage of the primary meter, check whether the units are actually commensurable — and if they are not, say so on the page.
3. Loosening entitlements is a quieter lever than cutting price. Sendbird gave away 2.5x the connection headroom in 2022 and 10x the free-tier MAU in 2024 without changing a single headline number. Neither move reset the anchor or triggered a renewal renegotiation, which a price cut of equivalent value would have.
4. Stale pricing content is a liability that compounds. A FAQ table labelled “June, 2021” is still live in 2026 quoting numbers the slider above it contradicts. Any figure hard-coded outside the system of record will eventually contradict it, so either generate it from that system or delete it.
5. Every retired pricing URL should redirect, not 404. sendbird.com/pricing, /pricing/ai-chatbot and /pricing/live are all dead ends. Retired SKUs are a normal part of a decade-long product life, but a 404 on the canonical pricing path hands the summary of your pricing to whoever ranks for it instead.

UBP implications

1. Usage-based pricing can be un-adopted, and the archive remembers. Sendbird has withdrawn a published rate card twice — Chat in 2016, AI Chatbot in 2025 — and both times the overage rate went first. The pattern to watch across the corpus is not “does this vendor use UBP” but “is the vendor’s usage rate still visible after they moved upmarket,” because enterprise motions systematically pull rates off the page.
2. Bundling makes the unpriced product’s list price public in reverse. Sendbird will not price Business Messaging, but it will tell you the bundled allowance is worth “$122/month” at 5K MAU and “$2,345/month” at 100K+ — which is a per-message rate anyone can back out. Vendors running a sales-only SKU alongside a self-serve one should assume the bundle disclosure prices the sales-only product for them.
3. A per-minute rate card can be a durable asset rather than a liability. Sendbird’s Calls rates have not moved in five years while the rest of the corpus repriced repeatedly. When the underlying unit cost is bandwidth rather than inference, pure usage pricing buys stability the AI-era vendors cannot offer — and stability is itself a selling point to a finance team building a three-year forecast.

Sources

• Sendbird Chat pricing — canonical pricing entry point; MAU slider, plan cards, comparison table and billing FAQ (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird Calls pricing — per-minute voice/video/recording rates and the credit/voucher FAQ (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird Business Messaging pricing — quote request form, no published prices (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird vs Stream comparison — side-by-side price table and migration offer (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird AI contact sales — delight.ai enterprise AI agent lead form, no published prices (accessed 2026-09-05)
• delight.ai AI agent ROI calculator — savings model; outputs a cost line without disclosing a rate (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird contact sales — enterprise quote form (accessed 2026-09-05)
• delight.ai AI agent — the AI agent’s product home after the November 2025 rebrand; sendbird.com/ai-agent 301-redirects here (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird blog — company announcements and product posts (accessed 2026-09-05)
• Sendbird has no pricing hub: https://sendbird.com/pricing returns HTTP 404 (checked 2026-09-05). https://sendbird.com/pricing/ai-chatbot and https://sendbird.com/pricing/live also return HTTP 404 (checked 2026-09-05).
• Historical prices in this analysis are read from Internet Archive captures of Sendbird’s own pricing pages between 2016-03-05 and 2026-08-04; each pricingHistory entry names the snapshot it was read from.

Bottom line

Sendbird is the clearest case in the corpus of a company whose transparency tracks its go-to-market rather than its product. Chat is priced honestly and legibly up to 25,000 MAU and then stops; Calls is a complete, five-year-stable per-minute rate card; Business Messaging and the delight.ai AI agent publish nothing at all. The through-line across ten years of archives is that Sendbird knows how to publish a rate — it published a per-user overage price in 2016 and a per-1,000-credit AI overage in 2024 — and withdraws that rate each time the deal size grows. Buyers get a precise floor and an unbounded ceiling, which is a fine trade for a five-person team on Starter and a hard one for anyone whose traffic is spiky, multi-device, or growing.

Want to compare Sendbird against other communications and customer-service API vendors? Browse the pricing blueprint, or read how Intercom monetized the same AI-support shift in our Intercom pricing analysis.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Current state: no pricing hub, three models, one unpublished overage rate

Sep 2026

sendbird.com/pricing returns HTTP 404; /pricing/chat is the canonical entry point, with Business Messaging and Calls as sibling tabs. Chat prices at the 5K/10K/25K slider steps are $349/$399, $429/$519 and $1,119/$1,349 for Starter and $499/$599, $579/$699 and $1,399/$1,649 for Pro (annual/monthly); 50K and 100K+ show Contact sales. Calls rates are unchanged from 2021 for communication and from 2023 for cloud recording. No MAU or peak-connection overage rate is published anywhere on the estate.

Chat introduces annual-versus-monthly split pricing; AI credits leave the bundle

Nov 2025

Both published Chat prices are restated as an annual headline with a monthly premium printed underneath: Starter 5K at $349/month billed annually "or $399/month billed monthly", Pro 5K at $499/month billed annually "or $599/month billed monthly." The monthly figures are unchanged from 2023, so this is a roughly 12.5% annual-commitment discount rather than a price cut. The PLATFORM OFFER bundle simultaneously drops its "AI chatbot 1K free message credits" line, leaving only Business Messaging in-app messages. The change lands between the 2025-01-30 and 2025-11-29 snapshots; the Wayback archive has no /pricing/chat capture in between, so the exact date is unknown. Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20251129002929.

AI agent spun onto its own brand and domain as Delight.ai

Nov 2025

Sendbird announces Delight.ai, "the first branded AI concierge built on long-term memory" (PR Newswire, dateline San Mateo, Calif., Nov. 18, 2025). The AI agent leaves sendbird.com: as of 2026-09-05, sendbird.com/ai-agent and sendbird.com/careers both 301-redirect to delight.ai. Delight.ai publishes no rate card — delight.ai/pricing redirects to an educational blog article about AI-agent pricing models that contains no Delight.ai prices. Sendbird's on-domain AI surface is reduced to a lead form at sendbird.com/ai/contact-sales.

AI agent repositioned as zero-seat-fee with Sendbird Desk bundled free

Jun 2025

The AI Agent pricing page gains an explicit anti-seat-fee pitch: "Enterprise-grade AI. Human helpdesk included for free. With every Sendbird AI agent, you get Sendbird Desk – our full-featured ticketing system – completely free", listing "No per-agent fees" alongside "Consumption-based pricing." Desk, which had been a separately sold product since 2020, stops being a standalone SKU and becomes a bundled inclusion. The page also confirms there is no AI-agent free trial: "While we don't offer a free trial, you can contact us for a personalized demo." Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20250610055035.

Published AI prices withdrawn; /pricing defaults to a sales-only AI Agent tab

Apr 2025

The $99 and $499 AI Chatbot plans and the $5-per-1,000-credit overage rate disappear. The AI Chatbot tab is replaced by an AI Agent tab that becomes the default landing tab of sendbird.com/pricing and carries no prices at all — only "Consumption-based pricing / Volume discounts as you scale / Tailored professional services" and a contact form. Sendbird's own FAQ on that page states: "Sendbird offers flexible, consumption-based pricing tailored to your business size and conversation volume. Custom quotes are available upon request." This is the second time Sendbird has withdrawn a published rate card. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20250130111316 and 20250417115642.

Free tier renamed and expanded 10x; PLATFORM OFFER bundle added to every Chat card

Dec 2024

The Developer card (100 MAU, 10 peak concurrent connections) becomes Free trial at 1,000 MAU and 20 peak concurrent connections — a 10x MAU expansion of the free tier. A "PLATFORM OFFER" panel is added to every Chat card, priced as a value claim rather than a charge: "$122/month value... 30K free in-app messages" of Business Messaging plus "1K free message credits" of AI chatbot at the 5K MAU step. The AI Chatbot free trial is cut from 30 days to 14. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20240612175253 and 20241206071715.

AI Chatbot ships a published self-serve ladder with a published overage rate

May 2024

Sendbird launches /pricing/ai-chatbot with real prices: a 30-day free trial with 1,000 message credits, Starter at $99/month for 10,000 message credits, Pro at $499/month for 50,000, and Enterprise by quote. The footnote publishes an overage rate — "$5 overage fee will be applied for every 1,000 message credit" — and a model-weighted credit table (1 credit per bot message for GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, Llama 3 and Solar; 10 for GPT-4-turbo and Claude 2.1). In the same window Notifications is renamed Business Messaging at /pricing/business-messaging, still with no published price. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20240530070836 and 20240530065217.

Cloud recording added to Calls; Sendbird Live priced per streamed minute

Dec 2023

Two per-minute rates are added to the Calls rate card that were absent through January 2023: cloud recording at $0.0014/minute for voice and $0.0059/minute for video. Separately, a short-lived /pricing/live page publishes livestream rates of $0.0037 per minute per user for audio and video, $0.0015 for audio only, with cloud recording at $0.0059 and $0.0014. Sendbird Live and its published rate card were later discontinued — /pricing/live returns HTTP 404 as of 2026-09-05. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20231207031133 and 20231204220918.

Pro 5K cut 25% from $799 to $599; pricing splits onto per-product URLs

Mar 2023

Pro at the 5K MAU step drops from $799/month to $599/month while Starter holds at $399/month — the only outright headline price cut in the tracked range. The change lands between the 2023-01-29 snapshot (Pro $799) and the 2023-03-25 snapshot (Pro $599). The single /pricing page also begins splitting into per-product URLs, with /pricing/calls first archived on 2023-03-27. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20230129082815 and 20230325205125.

Developer free plan added; peak-connection cap loosened from 2% to 5% of MAU

May 2022

A fourth card appears at the left of the ladder: Developer, Free, 100 MAU, 10 peak concurrent connections, "No overages allowed", all pro features, no credit card required, community support. Simultaneously the peak concurrent connection cap on Starter and Pro moves from "2% of MAU" to "5% of MAU" — a 2.5x loosening of the second capacity meter at no change in price. Both were in place by this snapshot and absent from the 2021-12-01 snapshot. Source: web.archive.org snapshots 20211201092728 and 20220511155106.

The "Latest Sendbird pricing (June, 2021)" FAQ table appears — and then never changes

Aug 2021

A FAQ answer titled "Latest Sendbird pricing (June, 2021)" is added, quoting 5K MAU at $399 Starter / $599 Pro, 10K at $499 / $749, 25K at $1,199 / $1,799, and Talk to Sales at 50K and 100K. It contradicts the card directly above it, which still prices Pro 5K at $799. The same table, with the same June-2021 label and the same numbers, is still live on sendbird.com/pricing/chat in September 2026. Calls per-minute rates are published on the same page for the first time in the tracked range: voice $0.0010 peer-to-peer and $0.0015 server-relayed, video $0.0014 and $0.0035. Six-month message retention is codified. Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20210816201817.

Promotional list-versus-sale pricing rendered on the cards

Jan 2021

The January 2021 snapshot renders a struck-through higher figure beside each headline price: Starter 5K shows $799 struck to $399, and Pro 5K shows $1,499 struck to $799. By the June 2021 snapshot the struck-through list prices are gone and only $399 and $799 remain, making the promotional rate the standing rate. The change lands within weeks of Sendbird's $100M Series C at a reported $1.05B valuation (announced 2021-04-06). Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20210128011025.

Self-serve MAU-tiered ladder returns: Starter 5K at $399, Pro 5K at $799

Jun 2020

Published prices come back after four sales-only years, in the shape Sendbird still uses: a MAU slider from 5K to 100K, Starter 5K at $399/month and Pro 5K at $799/month with "*Overages may apply", and Enterprise at "Custom pricing with millions of MAU." Peak concurrent connections are capped at 2% of the MAU limit on every tier. Chat, Calls and Desk are now three distinct products, with Calls and Desk both routed to "Talk to an expert." A named customer success manager and quarterly service review are gated at "$50k in ARR." Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20200617052314.

Free-plan enforcement stated in writing; Desk folded in as a feature row

Oct 2018

The sales-only page adds a hard enforcement rule for the free tier: on hitting 1,000 MAU or 25 peak connections "we will send an email... If you do not contact us within three days, your users will not be able to login until you upgrade." The MAU and Peak Connection definitions settle into the wording still used in 2026, including "this counts devices, not users." Live support chat software (ticketing, agent management, auto-routing) appears as a feature row rather than a separately priced product. Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20181030020036.

All published prices withdrawn; page collapses to Free plus Custom

Oct 2016

By this snapshot the plan cards show only two options — FREE and CUSTOM PRICING ("A full chat experience for businesses", Contact Us). The Sprout/Tree/Park prices survive only inside the stale FAQ's proration examples. The free tier is fixed at 1,000 MAU / 25 peak connections, 3-month message retention, 5GB storage and traffic, 5MB per file. The MAU definition is rewritten from message-based to connection-based: "counted when a user account is created on SendBird system and the user connected to SendBird servers within 30 days." Published self-serve pricing does not return for roughly four years. Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20161025165310.

Named tier ladder with published per-user MAU overage rates

Mar 2016

The earliest archived pricing page (then trading as Smile Family, Inc.) sells "monthly subscriptions with volume pricing based on Chat MAU." Its FAQ's worked billing examples name the ladder and the prices: Sprout at $49/month ($588 billed annually), Tree at $179/month ($1,788 annually), Park at $599/month ($5,988 annually), plus Enterprise and a 1,000-MAU free plan. Crucially, the overage rate is published: "you will be charged $0.012/user with Sprout pricing, $0.011/user with Tree pricing, $0.010/user with Park pricing, and even lower with Enterprise pricing." MAU is then defined as any user who sent or received a message in 30 days. Source: web.archive.org snapshot 20160305121502 of sendbird.com/pricing.