Elevating Experiences: Stream’s Roadmap for 2023 & 2024

2023 has been an exciting year full of progress, learning, and celebration. Find out what else we’ve got planned on the product roadmap to close out Q4 strong and enter 2024 even stronger.

Thierry S.
Thierry S.
Published September 28, 2023

When Tommaso and I started Stream, we couldn't have imagined the growth we've seen over the last few years. Some of the world's largest apps now use our APIs and SDKs. Global brands like TaskRabbit, Hopin, IBM, SoundCloud, Adobe, Healthline, and Gojek rely on Stream. Patreon just launched a beautiful new community experience. We have thousands of customers, reach over 100k developers, and more than one billion end users.

A huge thank you is in order to the customers who took a chance on Stream when we were a small startup. Everything announced today is only possible thanks to your support.

Chat Migration Services

Our focus on SDK quality and performance has resulted in many customers switching from in-house builds and competing providers, earning Stream the title of fastest-growing chat API on the market.

Patreon, Ajaib, and PocketGems are examples of customers with existing chat functionality who have made the switch. To make this easier, we offer a migration service to guarantee that you can make the switch in four weeks or less.

Free Tier & Pricing

It's been challenging to watch as the economic tech downturn has impacted some of our smaller customers. Founders and early teams put in so much work to see their vision come to life, and we want to do everything we can to help them. Here's how we're changing pricing to support these companies:

  • Free Chat Tier: We're creating a free tier for chat so you don't have to work around trial periods during development.
  • Lower Self-Serve Cost: We're lowering chat pricing for self-serve customers. Keep an eye out for the official announcement in the coming weeks.
  • Free Video Tier: Video will have a free tier of up to $50 of usage per month.
  • Maker Plan Extension: Customers on our Maker Plan receive a free MAU of 10K for chat and $100 of free video usage per month.

Vendor Viability

When you build your app on top of an API or any other cloud service, you want to feel confident it will run smoothly and that the provider will be a long-term partner in the growth of your business.

The VC landscape is uncertain, and many of our competitors are going through layoffs or are moving out of the market. We want our customers to feel confident that they can build on our SDKs for years to come, and we're happy to announce that Stream is on track to become profitable in 2024. 

Our customers care about SDK & API stability, performance, security, customer support, and financial stability. We're especially proud of Stream's performance and stability track record. Our response times average 9ms, and we can scale up to 5 million concurrent members in a single channel. This is possible due to our tech stack based on Go, RocksDB, and Raft. By the way, if you enjoy scaling high-traffic services in Go, we're hiring.

Regarding stability, we offer a 99.999% SLA uptime SLA with 100x acceleration. Stream is SOC2 compliant based in the EU and the USA. We follow all local privacy laws.

Stream's support team replies in an average of 30 minutes, and for Enterprise customers, there are shared Slack channels that connect you directly with our engineering team.

The Roadmap

As we continue to invest in our products and help our customers achieve their goals, we would greatly appreciate your feedback. Reach out to product@getstream.io and let us know what would improve your experience.

Chat

Stream is currently the fastest-growing chat API on the market. Our emphasis on product quality, documentation, support, and performance already resonates with many prospects and customers. However, we still have many exciting features and improvements we're working on:

  • Campaigns API: Undergoing a round of improvements.
  • Polls API: Coming soon.
  • Async Voice Notes: Released for iOS and Android, and the other SDKs will soon follow.
  • Advanced Analytics: Currently being specced by our product team.
  • Dashboard Redesign: Improving UX.

Video

Our roadmap is visible on Github, and we look forward to your feedback. The video API currently supports calls and live streams for up to 10k participants, with an even higher audio room limit. We aim to benchmark up to 100k participants for all video and audio communication forms by the end of 2023.

AI Moderation & Advanced Moderation

Our content moderation tools specialize in three things: protecting our customers' brands, improving the safety of social experiences, and simplifying the process of achieving global compliance regulations.

Stream is the only Chat and Video API and SDK provider with a no-code AI-powered Content Moderation solution. We are committed to helping our customers protect their users with chat moderation and comply with the latest regulations.

Some of the capabilities we plan to introduce in 2024 include:

  • Dashboard: To greatly simplify moderation work.
  • Filters: New domain and email filters.
  • Custom Data: Introducing custom data on flagging messages by users or moderators.
  • Moderation Log: To register the moderator's actions.
  • AI Engine Improvements: For Semantic Filters, CSpam, and Platform Circumvention.

Activity Feeds

With global customers like eToro, Dana, and SoundCloud, Stream's Activity Feeds API is a proven, mature, industry-leading product that can scale to apps with over a hundred million users.

  • Frontend Integration: The way developers integrate SDKs & APIs has changed. Currently, Feeds requires a backend integration. We will rework it to support frontend integrations and a more modern development workflow.
  • Notification and Campaigns Connection: The notification feed will connect to our Campaigns API and other platform components for better cross-product integration.
  • Feed Moderation: Lastly, we plan to integrate feeds with moderation.

The Exciting Road Ahead

I cannot thank our team and customers enough. It's a great feeling to know our APIs and SDKs help thousands of apps serve over a billion end users who are making a difference in the world. We feel excited and inspired to continue iterating and improving the developer and end-user experience.

We hope some of these roadmap items pique your interest. If we missed anything on your wish list, reach out to product@getstream.io and let us know what we can add. Cheers to the close of a successful 2023, and we look forward to an even better new year.