TCO CALCULATOR
Run your numbers: self-hosted vs cloud IM
Enter your scale and horizon for an instant total-cost-of-ownership comparison.
Self-hosted vs cloud IM: run your numbers
Enter your scale to compare IMCore’s fixed licensing against usage-billed cloud IM over 1–5 years. Competitor list prices collected 2026-10, promos excluded.
Horizonyr
IMCore totals include estimated self-hosted infra cost, ops labor excluded; cloud figures are list prices without negotiated discounts.
Method & assumptions
- Competitor prices: Tencent Cloud IM Pro, Easemob Pro, NetEase Yunxin Advanced and RongCloud Flagship (peak-DAU tiers) are 2026-10 official list prices; Stream / CometChat are annual-billing list prices; Sendbird’s larger tiers are third-party estimates.
- IMCore: the edition is picked by daily messages (40 msgs/user/day; Basic 50K/day, Plus 200K/day, Pro 1M/day) at annual subscription pricing, plus an infra-cost estimate by scale; the international mode assumes DAU ≈ MAU/3.
- Migration cost and ops labor are excluded on both sides; cloud overage is estimated from the monthly peak.
- Results are order-of-magnitude references; formal quotes come from each vendor.