Free to Build. Pay Only When You Earn.

mesibo is free for non-commercial use — students, individual developers, non-profit organisations, NGOs, academic and research institutions, environment and climate initiatives, and anyone building apps without a commercial purpose.

If you are using mesibo commercially, you are required to use the Production plan. This ensures mesibo can continue investing in infrastructure, security, and platform development that benefits everyone.

An app or deployment is commercial if it falls into any of the following:

• —Monetizing in any form — advertising, subscriptions, in-app purchases, or any other revenue model
• —Funded companies — angel, VC, institutional, or grant-funded organisations
• —Agency or client work — deploying mesibo as part of a paid engagement for a client
• —Internal enterprise use — used within a company that derives commercial benefit from the deployment
• —Commercially launched apps — any app available to the public with a commercial purpose, even if not yet generating revenue

When in doubt, write to us at support@mesibo.com — we are happy to help you determine the right plan.

mesibo's Free plan gives developers $600 in credits every year — $50 every month — with no questions asked and no credit card required.

All new accounts receive $50 in credits on signup, valid for 30 days. This allows full evaluation of all mesibo features including cloud deployment. After 30 days, non-commercial users can continue using mesibo without paying by self-hosting the platform.

Monthly Credit Renewal — Free credits must be renewed monthly from the mesibo console. The renew credit button appears 2 days (48 hours) before your current credits expire (every 28 days) and adds fresh credits valid for the next 30 days. You can keep renewing every month as long as you are actively developing.

To ensure the Free plan serves genuine developers and is not misused, the following fair use rules apply once your app exceeds 250 registered users. These rules reflect the natural usage patterns of real apps and are invisible to legitimate users.

Active User Ratio — At least 50% of registered users must be monthly active. This ensures free resources are not consumed by dormant or inactive test users. There is no limit as long as users are active.

Platform Distribution — Mobile users (Android + iOS) must exceed JavaScript and Python users combined.

Legitimate apps with real users will naturally satisfy both conditions without any effort.

A user is counted as active (MAU) if any real-time or backend API operation is performed on them within a monthly billing cycle — connecting, sending or receiving messages, making or receiving calls, etc. Each user is counted once per cycle regardless of how many operations they perform.

There is no limit on total users. However, to prevent misuse, your MAU must be at least 25% of total users. If MAU falls below this, it is counted as (total users × 25) / 100.

For self-hosted deployments, there is no limit on concurrent users. For cloud, the concurrent user limit is 10% of your MAU. In practice, simultaneous users are generally below 5% of MAU. If you exceed the 10% limit, you are billed for MAU = concurrent users × 10.

There is no limit on total groups for self-hosted deployments. For cloud, groups should not exceed 4× your MAU. If exceeded, MAU is counted as total groups / 4. This is a generous limit only to prevent misuse by apps that create unlimited groups with no active users.

Bandwidth consumed by real-time client connections, messaging, backend API calls, webhooks, push notifications, database connections, and server-side URL previews all count. Media bandwidth for one-to-one voice and video calls does not count. There is also a small TLS overhead (~3.5–6 KB per handshake) and protocol signaling overhead for calls, group sync, and history operations.

Storage includes all data accumulated within a billing cycle: messages, users, groups, profiles, call logs, and location data. Messages are stored only when the destination is offline; you can disable per-message storage via the Real-time API. Retention is unlimited, limited only by your quota. You can clear storage anytime from the console or via Backend APIs.

One-to-one audio and video calls are free and unlimited on all deployments — no charges for duration or media bandwidth. Approximately 5–8 signaling messages (~50 KB) are exchanged per call and count toward bandwidth.

For conferencing on cloud, mesibo charges $1/GB of participant bandwidth and $0.01 per participant per call. There are no conferencing charges for self-hosted deployments.

Scripting and chatbot execution is free for self-hosted deployments. On cloud, charged at $0.01 per second of CPU duration, measured from when your script begins executing until it returns or terminates, rounded up to the nearest 1 ms.

mesibo recommends using your own file servers to keep sensitive files under your control — there are no file charges in that case, for either self-hosted or cloud deployments.

If you choose to use the mesibo file server (available for both deployment types), charges apply: $0.079/GB for bandwidth and $0.02/GB for storage. This option is primarily intended for prototyping and evaluation.

TURN servers dramatically improve reliability for video and voice calls when users are behind firewalls, non-cooperative routers, or symmetric NAT. TURN is available for both self-hosted and cloud deployments and is enabled by default.

If you use mesibo's TURN service, it is charged at $0.75/GB regardless of deployment type. You can disable it from the mesibo console or configure your own TURN server at no charge from mesibo.

Production accounts have a minimum billing of $49/month per account, irrespective of MAU, number of apps, or deployment type. This ensures dedicated infrastructure is always available for your app. It is not an additional fee — once your monthly usage reaches $49, the minimum does not apply separately.

Minimum billing is waived for Free plan accounts — your monthly $50 credits cover this automatically.

Your account is charged at Pay-As-You-Go rates from your billing date, covering all chargeable resources consumed in the calendar month. All prices are in US dollars ($). You may cancel at any time by stopping usage. There is no refund of remaining credit balance.

You can create unlimited apps from a single account. The first three apps are included with no extra charge. Each additional app beyond three incurs an extra minimum billing of $19/month per app to prevent misuse. Apps created should justify their usage relative to active users.

There is no limit on API calls for creating users, groups, and members. For all other operations, monthly invocations should not exceed 10× your MAU — excess is billed at cloud MAU rates. Free accounts get 1,000 free invocations/month; paid accounts get 10,000, irrespective of MAU.