What LiveGrid is
A voice and video call stack you host yourself, and what that buys you.
LiveGrid exists because of one decision: the media server runs on a computer you rent, in a region you chose, with a key pair you hold.
Everything else follows from that. There is no per-minute platform bill on the transport, no account that can be suspended, no ceiling on concurrent rooms that somebody else sets, and no third party holding the audio of your customers' conversations.
What it is#
Four processes and a database. In full on Control plane and media plane; in one line each:
- Media plane —
livekit-serveron a rented box. Routes packets between participants. One per region, entirely independent of the others. - Control plane — a small Node service. Mints join tokens, dispatches agents, answers the MCP surface. Never carries media.
- API — a Flask app. Call history, statistics, avatar enrolment, webhook receipt. Everything scoped to an organisation.
- Worker — the agent itself, running beside the media plane, listening and speaking and writing down what happened.
What it is not#
- Not a hosted platform. Nothing here is running for you until you stand it up. Deploy
- Not telephony, yet.
mode: 'phone'is accepted bystart_calland there is no SIP trunk behind it in this kit. A call placed today is a web or app call. - Not a client SDK. Participants join with LiveKit's own client SDKs — JavaScript, Swift, Android, Flutter, and the rest. LiveGrid mints the token they join with; what happens in the browser is LiveKit's API, documented here (opens in a new tab).
What running it yourself costs#
About $7 a month per region for the media plane, plus whatever your models and your avatar vendor charge per minute. The media plane page has the exact machine types and prices, measured rather than estimated.
The number worth knowing before you start: a region is a whole VM, not a slice of one, and a second region is a second $7 subscription — not a bigger purchase. Cancel either without touching the other.
When you should not use this#
Honestly: if you need one voice agent, occasionally, and never want to think about a firewall rule, a hosted platform is a better trade. Self-hosting buys sovereignty and unit economics at the price of operating a box. That trade is worth making when calls are the product, and is not worth making when they are a feature you are testing.