💡 Target Audience: Enterprise Server Admins and Finance Teams exhausted by SendBird's unpredictable monthly bill shocks.

The only question that matters: what does your invoice track?

Every chat API bills something. The whole comparison comes down to which number the meter watches, because that number decides whether your bill grows with *revenue* or with *popularity*.

• MAU billing (SendBird's model, and CometChat's) tracks how many distinct people opened your app this month.
• HyperBabel tracks peak concurrent connections and throughput — how much traffic you actually moved.

Those two curves diverge violently the moment your product works.

Why MAU punishes exactly the growth you want

Consider a community app that runs a seasonal campaign.

Traffic rose 29%. Real conversation rose 67%. But MAU tripled — because 80,000 people opened the app once, read a notification, and left.

Under MAU billing, your invoice triples for users who cost you almost nothing to serve. That is the structural problem: a lurker and a power user cost the same on your bill, but not on your infrastructure. Worse, the spike lands *after* the campaign, in the month you are trying to measure ROI.

What HyperBabel bills instead

HyperBabel charges a flat plan for capacity, plus published overage rates if you exceed the included quota. Nothing is metered per person.

Two properties matter more than the numbers themselves:

1. Linear, not exponential. Doubling engagement doubles the metered units. It never multiplies them.
2. Nothing is per-user. 120,000 people opening the app changes your bill only to the extent they actually generated traffic.

Worked scenario: an 8,000 DAU community

Assumptions: 8,000 DAU, peak concurrency ~1,000, 3M messages/month, 4,000 active channels, 2,000 user-minutes of HD video, 500 GB of media downloaded by users.

If your volumes are smaller, Basic at $99/mo covers 1M messages, 200 channels, 500K translated characters, 3,000 user-minutes of 1:1 HD video and 1,000 minutes of speech translation — group calls and live streaming start on Scale.

Now model the same month on a per-MAU platform. We deliberately do not print a competitor's price here, because vendor pricing changes and quotes are negotiated — use their current published rate and this formula:

monthly cost ≈ (MAU ÷ 1,000) × your vendor's per-1,000-MAU rate
             + video minutes × video rate
             + translation add-on
             + egress on media downloads

Run it twice: once with 40,000 MAU, once with 120,000. If the second number frightens you, that is not a pricing accident — it is the business model working as designed.

When SendBird is genuinely the better choice

We would rather you pick correctly than churn in three months. SendBird is the stronger option when:

• You need drop-in UIKit screens today. SendBird's prebuilt UI components are mature and broad. If your team's constraint is front-end capacity rather than infrastructure cost, that shortcut is real value.
• Your buyer requires a specific compliance certification or a named enterprise support contract that a newer platform has not yet completed.
• Your traffic is small and flat. Below roughly a thousand daily active users, the pricing models converge and the difference stops being interesting.
• You are deep into a multi-year contract where migration cost exceeds the savings for the remaining term.

If none of those describe you — and especially if your MAU is far larger than your *messaging* population — the model is working against you.

Migration checklist

Teams that move without downtime tend to follow the same seven steps:

1. Measure your real shape first — peak concurrency, messages/month, active channels, media egress. Most teams have never looked at these separately.
2. Run both platforms in parallel. Route new conversations to HyperBabel; leave existing threads on the old platform.
3. Export history in batches, oldest first, and verify counts per channel rather than in aggregate.
4. Map identity. Decide whether your existing user IDs become HyperBabel end-user identities directly, or through a mapping table.
5. Move webhooks before you move traffic, so your downstream systems are already receiving the new event shapes.
6. Keep the old SDK installed for one release cycle as a rollback path.
7. Cut over reads last. Writes first, reads last — that ordering makes rollback cheap.

The 30-second version

MAU billing charges you for attention. HyperBabel charges you for traffic. If your product's job is to attract many people who each speak a little, MAU is the most expensive possible way to buy chat.

⚠️ Competitor pricing changes and enterprise quotes are negotiated. Compare the *structure* here, then verify current numbers on each vendor's own pricing page before you decide.