The platform fee adds up
One team cut its cost from about $6 an hour to about $2 an hour by running LiveKit in its own AWS account. At volume, the per-minute platform fee is the line item you can remove.
Open-source savings calculator and porter: migrate a voice agent from Vapi or Retell to LiveKit Agents, running on your own keys.
| STT + LLM + TTS | $0.0364 |
| Hosting (LiveKit Cloud) | $0.0145 |
One team cut its cost from about $6 an hour to about $2 an hour by running LiveKit in its own AWS account. At volume, the per-minute platform fee is the line item you can remove.
When people on the LiveKit forum ask how to replace Vapi or Retell, the usual answer is: use LiveKit Agents as the runtime and build the rest yourself. That rewrite is the part nobody wants to start.
A developer was surprised that one 10-minute call cost $1.50–2.00 once STT, LLM, TTS and telephony were added up. Agencies ask the same question before every deployment.
Pull your calls and assistants with your Vapi API key, or load exported JSON. Retell agents come in as files.
Your real $/min (from call costs) next to the same models on LiveKit Cloud or self-hosted. Monthly savings and payback in months.
Get a LiveKit Agents project: prompt, first message, STT/LLM/TTS, tools that call your existing backend, and a report of every setting that needs a human.
pip install voiceshift # source code coming soon until published: pip install -e . voiceshift demo # sample assistant + calls, no accounts export VAPI_API_KEY=... # your own key, read from the environment voiceshift fetch-vapi --out export/ voiceshift calc --vapi-calls export/calls.json --minutes 60000 \ --hosting self-hosted --fixed-monthly 600 voiceshift port --from vapi export/assistants.json --assistant "My agent" --out my-agent/
Prices are provisional and may change before launch.
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