One SDK.
Any topology.
The real-time layer for modern apps — video, voice, and live streaming from 1:1 calls to 50,000-viewer broadcasts.
Every modern app needs real-time. The infrastructure for it is still stuck in 2016.
Three structural problems, one migration event, a decade of accumulated glue code.
- Telehealth startup
Stitches Twilio Video (EOL Dec 2026), Deepgram, and Pusher. Four contracts, four SLAs, one on-call schedule that nobody wants.
- Creator platform
Runs LiveKit for chat, Mux for broadcast, Clerk for auth, Stripe for billing. Four vendors, one experience, zero leverage.
- EdTech company
Pays $18k/yr for Zoom, gets no branding, and the recordings are 6 GB per hour.
Vendors specialize in one shape — meeting, webinar, or broadcast — and get awkward outside it.
Per-minute bundles hide CDN, storage, and AI costs. Shock bills are weekly HN stories.
EU, gov, health, and regulated customers can't run the same stack on-prem.
Twilio Video shuts down December 2026. 10,000+ applications need to migrate now. There has not been a moment like this in real-time infra for a decade.
A unified real-time SDK with honest pricing and on-prem parity.
One API surface across meeting, webinar, broadcast, and voice agent. Two meters. Same binaries for cloud and on-prem. A CLI that migrates Twilio for you.
Room, Track, Participant primitives for 1:1 calls, group meetings, webinars, and 50,000-viewer broadcasts.
Participant-minutes for meetings, viewer-hours for broadcasts. Broadcasts inherit CDN economics, not SFU economics.
Server-side re-encode absorbs the CPU cost for low-power senders.
1-hour classes are 500 MB, not 3 GB.
Managed cloud or Helm chart into your own Kubernetes cluster. Move between them when compliance changes.
npx levelchat migrate twilio | agora | zoom — diff-PR ready.
A $48B market, a $22B addressable slice, a $23M plan-of-record.
Gartner CPaaS forecast (Mar 2025); IDC RTC market note (Oct 2025); Grand View Research (Feb 2026).
Adjacent expansion not counted in SOM but material: voice-agent builders, live commerce, sports streaming — each a $2B+ sub-category on its own trajectory.
Five minutes, one call, 500-viewer broadcast, one recording, one migration.
A single unbroken demo loop that we run live on stage.
- 00:05npx levelchat init in a fresh directory.
- 00:15pnpm dev — open two browser tabs, we are on a call.
- 00:30Add mode="broadcast", refresh — same SDK, now handling 500 simulated viewers from a load-test script.
- 00:45Toggle room.record(), click stop. Output: 1.2 MB/min, AV1-Pro.
- 00:55npx levelchat migrate twilio in a cloned open-source Twilio Video sample — diff PR opens, compiles.
- 01:00Public pricing calculator slides — meeting and broadcast side-by-side.
Four revenue lines. PLG dominant. Usage expansion compounding.
| Line | Motion | Y1 mix | Y3 mix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed-cloud subscription | PLG | 55% | 42% |
| Usage-based overages (meters + AI) | PLG expansion | 30% | 33% |
| Creator-mode plans | PLG + partner | 10% | 13% |
| On-prem licenses | Sales-led | 5% | 12% |
Numbers refresh weekly — current file at docs/metrics/weekly.md.
Marked placeholder until deck-usage time. Filled live at meetings with last-seven-day snapshots.
Four compounding moats, none copy-paste-able in 12 months.
- 1Unified topology architecture
Cascade SFU + AV1/SVC + recording compression + viewer-hour CDN routing — a coordinated engineering bet that takes 18+ months to replicate.
- 2On-prem parity
US hyperscaler vendors will not sell a 10-file Helm chart that runs on Hetzner; it conflicts with their AWS/Azure partnership economics.
- 3Developer ecosystem flywheel
SDK surface, migration CLI, open-source upstream contributions, public benchmarks. Each lowers acquisition cost for the next developer.
- 4Pricing transparency
Calculator, per-dimension meters, no-surprises credit guarantee. Brand equity hard to copy without re-architecting pricing.
Five-year vision-of-moat: federated rooms (“Stripe Connect” for real-time), marketplace of third-party add-ons with a 15% take rate, spatial audio and 3D rooms for events and embedded experiences.
Six tailwinds. One migration event.
- Twilio Video EOL December 2026
Single largest migration event in real-time infra this decade.
- AV1 patent licensing clarified 2024
Now safe to ship at scale. 30–40% bandwidth savings unlocked.
- Safari 17+ AV1 decode
Last major browser blocker fell in 2024.
- Voice agents primary use case
LLM + TTS stacks need a real-time video/voice foundation layer.
- EU AI Act + GDPR enforcement
Enterprises now actively reject US-only data residency.
- Hetzner + Bunny priced to disrupt
Baremetal and CDN 5–10× cheaper than US hyperscaler equivalents.
We built this on nights and weekends with people who have done this before.
Previous infra/RTC work, scale systems shipped, public open-source contributions.
SRE, kubernetes/helm-fluent, ex-[Company].
Ex-[dev-tools company]; prolific conference speaker; author of [artifact].
Ex-[product-company]; shipped [notable app].
Advisors: [RTC-industry names + EdTech or Creator-platform operator]. Hiring next 6 months: 2 systems engineers (Go/C++), 1 mobile, 1 full-stack, 1 DevRel, 1 SE.
Raising $4M seed @ $20M post-money.
24-month plan. Milestones below, committed to on the record.
- Engineering (10 FTE by M12)$2.1M
- DevRel + Docs$400k
- Infra (Hetzner + Bunny + GPU pool)$500k
- Compliance (SOC2 II, HIPAA, ISO 27001)$200k
- GTM (content, sponsorships, conferences)$500k
- Legal + G&A$300k
- M6 — GA launch100 paying · 5 Enterprise pilots
- M12 — $1.2M ARRSOC2 II letter · HIPAA BAA · Helm v1
- M18 — $4M ARR120% NRR · LTV/CAC > 5 → Series A
- M24 — $7M+ ARR10 on-prem Enterprise customers
In five years, LevelChat is what “video, voice, and live” defaults to — the way auth defaults to Auth0/Clerk and payments defaults to Stripe.
The next generation of software is voice-first, video-native, and live by default. Classrooms, creator tools, voice agents, customer service, virtual-presence apps — all need a unified real-time primitive that doesn't lock them into a hyperscaler and doesn't make them pick between meeting and broadcast.
We are building that primitive.
Request an intro.
We're raising a $4M seed and actively shortlisting. If you lead infra/devtools pre-seed/seed — get in touch. The full financial model is available under NDA.
- Investing? info@levelchat.io
- Enterprise pilot? info@levelso.com
- Developer? Star the repo, join Discord, reply in the Show HN thread.
- Hiring us? Europe-first, fully remote. careers.
“Every decade, one layer of the stack becomes inevitable. Stripe took payments. Auth0 took identity. Vercel took deployments. The real-time layer is next. We intend to take it.”