Sendbird Pricing Explained: What It Really Costs to Scale AI Support

As AI agents move from experimental add-ons to the core of modern customer support, pricing transparency matters as much as functionality. Support leaders aren’t just asking what an AI agent can do — they’re asking how much it will cost to scale without breaking the budget.

Sendbird is a well-known provider of real-time chat APIs, powering customer conversations inside apps across industries. But its MAU (monthly active users) and usage-based pricing model make scaling AI agents unpredictable. Every additional conversation risks increasing costs, leaving businesses vulnerable to fluctuating bills.

That’s where pagergpt takes a different approach. Instead of charging by user activity, pagergpt delivers AI agents with transparent, session-based pricing, predictable, scalable, and built for customer support teams that want to control costs while expanding automation.

In this guide, we’ll break down Sendbird pricing, its limitations for AI agent deployment, and how pagergpt emerges as a stronger alternative for teams looking for both capabilities and cost clarity.

Sendbird is an API-first communication platform that enables developers to embed chat, voice, and video directly into mobile and web applications. At its core, Sendbird acts as the messaging infrastructure layer, powering real-time conversations across industries like consumer apps, marketplaces, telehealth, fintech, and e-commerce.

From an AI agent perspective, Sendbird provides the pipes but not the intelligence. It gives businesses the ability to add messaging capabilities into their products, but the actual AI automation layer — whether it’s ticket triage, FAQ bots, or customer-facing AI support agents — needs to be built and integrated separately. This often means pairing Sendbird with external AI models, orchestration layers, or custom development.

Sendbird is well-positioned for developer-heavy teams that want maximum flexibility to build custom AI-powered chatbots inside their apps. However, it requires technical expertise to turn that infrastructure into a fully functioning AI agent experience.

Sendbird’s pricing is based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs). On paper, this seems straightforward: you pay more as the number of people using your app’s chat grows. But in practice, especially for AI agents in customer support, this model can get expensive fast. Every AI-driven conversation adds to the MAU count, and when activity spikes, so does your bill.

Here’s how the main plans work in reality:

Free Plan (100 MAU)

Sendbird’s free plan is a lightweight entry point with just 100 monthly active users, basic chat APIs, and community support. It’s good enough for developers experimenting with the SDK, but in practice, even a tiny AI agent pilot could burn through that limit in days. It’s not viable for live customer support.

Starter Plan ($399/month for 5,000 MAU)

The Starter plan includes group messaging, some moderation tools, and email support. For support teams, this can handle a small FAQ bot or pilot project, but it lacks advanced analytics and doesn’t offer compliance features like HIPAA or SOC 2. Worse, every extra conversation handled by an AI agent increases your MAU count — meaning unpredictable bills as soon as usage grows.

Pro/Enterprise (Custom Pricing)

At the top end, Sendbird offers custom enterprise contracts. These include SLA-backed uptime, advanced moderation, translation, and compliance certifications. This is the tier enterprises need if they want to deploy AI agents at scale for regulated industries like healthcare or finance. But here’s the catch: pricing isn’t published, negotiations can lock you into long-term contracts, and costs balloon with higher MAU counts.

The real cost drivers

The real driver of Sendbird’s costs isn’t the base subscription — it’s MAU growth. For customer support, this means:

• AI agents that handle routine queries quickly multiply MAU usage.

• Seasonal events like Black Friday, holiday shopping, or product launches trigger sudden cost spikes.

• Scaling AI support across multiple regions compounds the problem, since each user interaction adds to the bill.

In short, Sendbird’s pricing scales with volume, not value. Teams don’t pay for better outcomes — they pay simply for more usage.

The hidden costs

Beyond the published tiers, there are several hidden costs that support teams often don’t see until after they’ve deployed:

• Add-ons: Essential features, such as advanced moderation, analytics dashboards, or translation, come with additional fees.

• Overages: Exceeding MAU caps results in unexpected overage charges, typically during high-demand periods.

• Compliance lock-in: HIPAA, SOC 2, and SLA-backed support are only available at enterprise levels, meaning smaller teams can’t access them without jumping tiers.

• Developer overhead: Sendbird provides infrastructure, not turnkey AI agents. Businesses require engineering resources to integrate and maintain AI workflows, incurring additional internal costs beyond subscription fees.

For AI agents in customer support, Sendbird delivers robust messaging infrastructure but leaves businesses vulnerable to unpredictable MAU-driven bills, hidden add-on charges, and the heavy lift of custom AI integration.

Sendbird offers a layered set of features across its pricing tiers. While every plan includes the basics needed to embed chat, the advanced capabilities that matter most for AI agents and customer support only unlock at higher tiers.

Every plan comes with the essentials needed to build messaging infrastructure:

• Chat SDKs & APIs for web, iOS, and Android

• 1:1 and group messaging for customer or agent conversations

• Push notifications to alert users when support replies arrive

• Basic moderation (profanity filters, message reporting)

• Community support (forums, developer docs)

For AI-driven support, these features provide the foundation for bots and agents to exchange messages with customers.

Advanced features in higher tiers

Sendbird’s more advanced capabilities only appear in Pro/Enterprise plans. These are the features that make AI agents scalable in real-world support environments:

• Advanced moderation & filters – tools to monitor and manage conversations at scale.

• Message translation – useful for multilingual AI agents handling global support.

• Delivery & read receipts – track whether customer messages and AI responses are seen.

• Analytics dashboards – insights into conversation flow and agent performance.

• Enterprise compliance – HIPAA, SOC 2, and SLA-backed uptime guarantees for regulated industries.

• Priority support – faster resolutions and account management for enterprise customers.

Features missing in lower tiers

While the Starter plan provides enough for simple bots, it lacks many of the critical features support teams expect when deploying AI agents:

• No advanced analytics – limits visibility into AI agent performance and customer sentiment.

• No compliance features – not suitable for healthcare, finance, or enterprise environments.

• No SLA-backed uptime – support teams risk reliability issues.

• Basic moderation only – higher-level tools like content classification and escalation workflows are gated.

• Limited support – community or email only, leaving gaps for mission-critical customer support.

Sendbird’s lower tiers provide the messaging rails but not the AI support engine. To unlock the features that make AI agents practical for customer support — analytics, compliance, and reliability, businesses must upgrade to the top-tier enterprise contracts, where pricing becomes opaque and costs escalate quickly.

Sendbird delivers one of the most robust messaging infrastructures on the market, but when it comes to AI-driven customer support, the pricing model introduces serious trade-offs. Here’s how it stacks up:

Pros

• Scalable infrastructure: Sendbird provides a strong API and SDK foundation for building AI agents, capable of handling high volumes of conversations reliably.

• Enterprise-grade compliance: At the higher tiers, Sendbird supports HIPAA and SOC 2 — essential for industries like healthcare and finance that want to deploy AI agents responsibly.

• Reliable backbone for automation: Its real-time messaging and notification system make it a solid base layer for automated support flows.

Cons

• Unpredictable costs from AI usage: Every AI-driven conversation increases MAU counts. For support teams with high chat volumes, this can make monthly bills spike unpredictably.

• Critical features locked to enterprise tiers: Analytics dashboards, advanced moderation, and compliance certifications are only available in top-tier plans, creating a steep cost barrier for smaller teams.

• Developer-heavy integration: Sendbird provides the pipes, not the automation. Businesses must invest in engineering resources to integrate AI/NLP engines, adding internal costs on top of subscriptions.

Where Sendbird’s MAU-based billing makes every AI-driven interaction a cost risk, pagergpt flips the model. Instead of charging by users or unpredictable activity spikes, pagergpt uses a session-based pricing model. That means every AI agent session is predictable in cost, making it far easier for support leaders to plan budgets.

Here’s how the plans work for AI-powered customer support:

Free Magic Plan

• What you get: 100+ AI sessions per month, a shared live inbox for handoffs, and branding removed.

• AI agent impact: Ideal for piloting a support bot or testing automations without worrying about sudden MAU overages.

Business Plan ($349/month)

• What you get: 1,000 AI sessions, advanced analytics dashboards, and omnichannel integrations with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

• AI agent impact: Best for SMBs and mid-market companies scaling AI agents across multiple support channels while keeping costs fully predictable.

Enterprise Plan (Custom Pricing)

• What you get: Session-based billing at enterprise scale plus advanced compliance — ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR — along with security features like RBAC and SSO.

• AI agent impact: Enables global support teams to scale AI automation in regulated industries without unpredictable billing.

The value of session-based pricing

Unlike Sendbird, where a spike in customer conversations can double or triple your bill, pagergpt keeps costs steady. The real driver is session volume, which is far easier to forecast than active users. AI agent costs scale cleanly with usage — no surprise charges, no hidden add-ons, and no expensive enterprise lock-in just to access compliance or analytics.

pagergpt offers transparent, predictable pricing for AI agents, making it one of the strongest Sendbird alternatives for customer support teams that need both scale and cost stability.

Sendbird vs pagergpt: Pricing-based comparison

When evaluating Sendbird vs pagergpt for AI agents in customer support, the differences come down to how each platform handles pricing, automation readiness, and support capabilities.

Pricing predictability

Sendbird uses a Monthly Active User (MAU) model, which means every AI-driven conversation pushes costs upward. This can make monthly bills hard to predict, especially when support volumes fluctuate. pagergpt’s session-based pricing removes that uncertainty, giving businesses a clear and stable cost structure that scales with usage.

AI agent readiness

Sendbird provides strong APIs and SDKs, but businesses must build and integrate their own AI logic, which can be time- and resource-intensive. pagergpt comes with AI agents built in — complete with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), automation workflows, and live agent handoff — making it much faster to deploy automation.

Support use cases

Sendbird is designed primarily for in-app chat, making it ideal for consumer apps or marketplaces embedding messaging into their product. pagergpt takes a broader approach with omnichannel coverage, supporting Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Messenger, and more — enabling unified customer support across multiple platforms.

Analytics & insights

Sendbird offers basic reporting but reserves detailed insights for its enterprise tiers. pagergpt includes advanced analytics dashboards across tiers, giving teams access to CSAT scores, sentiment analysis, and AI performance tracking without needing an upgrade.

Security & compliance

Sendbird provides enterprise compliance features like HIPAA and SOC 2, but only in higher-tier plans. pagergpt bundles compliance earlier, offering ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR with role-based access control (RBAC) and SSO options, making enterprise-grade security more accessible.

The takeaway: Sendbird is a good fit for developer-heavy teams building custom AI automation on top of APIs. pagergpt, by contrast, is better suited for support leaders who need predictable costs, out-of-the-box AI agents, omnichannel support, and actionable insights without hidden barriers.

Deciding between Sendbird and pagergpt ultimately comes down to how your team wants to approach AI agents in customer support. Both platforms serve very different needs.

If you choose Sendbird, you’re essentially buying the messaging infrastructure. It’s a strong option if your business wants to build custom AI agents on top of a chat API, control the automation logic in-house, and has a development team ready to manage SDK integrations and MAU-driven pricing. For enterprises with large budgets and technical teams, Sendbird offers flexibility — but costs will scale with usage.

On the other hand, pagergpt is designed for teams that want ready-to-deploy AI agents without the complexity of building them from scratch. With transparent, session-based pricing, support leaders know exactly what they’ll spend each month, even as AI conversations scale. And because pagergpt includes multi-channel support and advanced analytics by default, businesses don’t have to wait until they reach an enterprise contract to access critical features.

⚡ The decision point is clear: If your organization values flexibility and can absorb unpredictable costs, Sendbird is a good fit. If you want predictability, out-of-the-box AI agents, and omnichannel coverage, pagergpt is the stronger choice.

 👉 Ready to see the difference? Try pagergpt free today or book a demo to explore how AI Agents can transform your support experience.