Announcing Stream’s Maker Account: Free Chat & Activity Feed APIs

2 min read
Thierry S.
Thierry S.
Published March 17, 2021 Updated September 27, 2021

Today, we’re excited to announce the Stream Maker Account. The new plan provides qualifying teams with full and free access to Stream’s Chat API (2k MAU), Activity Feed API (9 million feed updates/month), and Video API. We’re excited to make our APIs accessible to side projects, new startups, and other earlier-stage ventures. The Maker Account has hard limits, so you never hit overages. No credit card is required.

View eligibility requirements for the Stream Maker Account here.

Stream’s APIs are based on Go, RocksDB & Raft. Currently, it powers activity feeds, chat, video, and audio for over a billion end users. The team is 115 strong now, but when Tommaso and I started Stream in 2015, we had a shoestring budget. It was just two guys focused on shipping code and getting feedback from early users. The free tiers and startup plans we used were very helpful back in the day. Now, we hope to pay it forward with Stream’s Maker Account. Personally, I’m very excited to see what people will build with it.

Getting Started With Stream

It’s easy to get started with Stream and build your chat or messaging experiences. We currently support UI components for React, React Native, Flutter, Kotlin, and Swift. In addition to our UI components, Stream provides a Chat SDK for all major languages.

The following tutorials quickly teach you how to build chat or messaging for your app using the platforms listed below:

Chat UI Kit

All SDKs ship with both low-level API access and ready-made UI components. Here’s how it looks by default:
Maker Account Mobile Chat Kit

The UI components give you a flexible way to quickly build chat for your application. You can also leverage the low-level SDKs to build any type of chat or messaging experience.

Maker Account Requirements

You can use the Maker Account completely free indefinitely as long you continue to meet the following requirements:

  • You have less than 5 team members AND
  • You’ve raised less than $100k in funding AND
  • You have less than $100k in annual revenue/ < $10k MRR
    AND
  • You agree to:
    • A hard cap on your plan (i.e. if you exceed your monthly active or concurrent user limits, additional users cannot connect to the service as opposed to rolling into overage charges). Limits are generous at 2,000 monthly active users and 100 concurrent connections for chat.
    • Low priority support

Additionally, to ensure we’re still able to provide quality support, the number of Maker Accounts issued will be limited initially.

To apply for the Maker Account, create a Stream account here and fill out the brief secondary application form that follows. Note that you can start building immediately, even while your application processes — your application will automatically activate a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) that will be converted to the Maker Account upon approval.

FAQ

Q: What’s the catch? How will you make money?
A: There is no catch. We don’t – in fact, we lose money on the Maker Account. We created it with Stream’s beginning in mind and a desire to support early-stage makers.

Q: Are there limitations to what I can build?
A: Our regular terms apply. You can build your own team chat app, your own Twitch, or customer support – whatever you feel like.

Q: What are the usage caps on the Maker Account?
A: 2,000 monthly active users and 100 concurrent connections for chat.