PLANS & PRICING
Choose the edition that fits your stage
From free self-hosting to enterprise high availability, every capability and cost boundary is explicit.
Basic
Single-instance IM core, self-hosted starter
Plus
Single instance with push / moderation / callbacks — production value
Pro
Cluster-scalable with push / moderation / callbacks — production-ready
Enterprise
Pro + admin console + Community (super-groups & channels) + external sync
Customer Service
Pro + the full AI customer-service suite
Perpetual buyout is a lifetime license with a 1-year upgrade window; renew at 10% of the buyout price per year, and keep running any in-window release forever. Contact sales for enterprise quotes.
Capability matrix
Feature comparison
| Basic | Plus | Pro | Enterprise | Customer Service | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IM Core | |||||
| Group, live-room and 1-on-1 conversations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Rich media messages (image / video / file / audio) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message ops (quote / edit / combined forward / pin / recall / delete / reactions) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Global message search across DMs and groups (English / CJK) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message expansion KV (polls / sign-up chains / surveys / task status) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Read receipts, delivery, presence and typing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Group management (roles / announcements / user groups / moderation) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| A/V call signaling (1-on-1 / multi-party / PK) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gift messages and effects | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| WebSocket + gRPC | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Media upload (OSS) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| UIKit component libraries (Web/React + Flutter, drop-in chat UI) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Performance & Scaling | |||||
| Horizontal scaling via RabbitMQ | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Horizontal scaling via NATS JetStream | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Protobuf high-performance encoding | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-device push (APNs / FCM / Huawei / Honor / Xiaomi / OPPO / vivo) | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Content moderation | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message callbacks | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message routing | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenAPI inbound push (profiles / friendships) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Management & Security | |||||
| Web admin console | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| RBAC roles and permissions | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Operation audit logs | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenAPI service credentials (scopes / expiry / shared quotas / audit) | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scoped message retention / object archive / recoverable deletion | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Data export / erasure and anonymization / legal hold | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tamper-evident audit / sensitive-data redaction / RPO-RTO drill tooling | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Enterprise Ops | |||||
| Ops trend dashboard (DAU / message volume) | — | — | — | ✓ | — |
| External business sync (users / friendships / history, with HA) | — | — | — | ✓ | — |
| RongCloud migration | — | — | — | ✓ | — |
| Community (super-groups & channels) | — | — | — | ✓ | — |
| AI Customer Service | |||||
| AI bot DMs with streaming replies | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Human handover and release | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Agent workspace (queue / SLA / history / statistics) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Agent teams, supervisor reassignment and group-service claims | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Support channels (web chat / in-app IM / email / WhatsApp / Telegram / Messenger / Instagram / WeChat MP / WeCom KF) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Proactive outreach (visitor invitation: delayed trigger / URL targeting / message) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Agent Copilot (reply suggestions + adoption reporting) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Help center (public self-service articles at /help, Markdown, SEO-friendly) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Business hours & offline policy (hours / queue or AI fallback / offline messages) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Agent performance reports (FRT / FCR / queue P95 / status durations) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Customer-360 profiles (tags / levels / custom fields / notes) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| CSAT satisfaction ratings (with low-score mining) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| RAG knowledge base (pgvector) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Function calling tools | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Voice message transcription | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| In-browser support voice (queue routing / agent callback / CPaaS extension) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| beforeChat rule hooks | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| AI long-term memory | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Post-call AI analysis (QA / summary / ticket) | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Digital-human video agent (avatar speaks bot replies via Volcengine FlowAct) | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scale & Quotas | |||||
| Concurrent connections | 2,000 | 2,000 | 10,000 | 50,000 | 10,000 |
| Deployment instances | 1 | 1 | 3 | 20 | 5 |
| Daily message cap | 50,000 | 200,000 | 1,000,000 | ∞ | 500,000 |
| AI bots | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 20 |
| KB documents | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,000 |
FAQ
Common questions
How far does the free edition scale?
The Basic edition is free for commercial use: one instance, 2,000 concurrent connections and 50,000 messages per day — roughly 1,000 DAU. Upgrade to a commercial edition when you need clustering, push, moderation or more scale.
How is IMCore delivered and deployed?
IMCore ships as Linux binaries with deployment docs. Run it with Docker Compose on one host, systemd on bare metal, or Kubernetes + Helm for a multi-instance cluster (RabbitMQ / NATS / Redis Streams). Your data never leaves your infrastructure.
What does the subscription include? What happens on expiry?
The annual subscription covers the license, version upgrades and technical support. After expiry the service keeps running, but upgrades and support stop.
How do international customers buy and pay?
The pricing page lists USD reference prices for each edition. Email sales@balala.im or submit the contact form (a WhatsApp number works well) to reach sales; after we confirm your needs we issue a formal quote and order, and the payment method and settlement details follow the order or contract.
Can I upgrade between editions?
Yes. Basic and Pro share one binary — upgrading is just a license swap; moving to Enterprise or Customer Service swaps in the matching binary (Ultimate / AI builds) plus the price difference. Database and config stay fully compatible.
Is source code available?
Binary delivery by default. Contact sales for source licensing.
What support is included?
Ticket and group-chat support; the Enterprise and Customer Service editions include deployment assistance. SLA per contract.