SMF·LIVESTORM
Can a prompt replace Livestorm?
Video meetings & webinars — webinars priced per attendee
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Livestorm now charges per attendee, which is an honest admission of where its cost sits: delivering live video to each additional person. That is infrastructure, and it is why this is a no. The half worth rebuilding is the engagement layer — polls, upvoted questions, attendance certificates — because it works beside any video source and because it is what turns a broadcast into something people remember attending.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build the audience-engagement layer for a live session. It sits beside a video you host anywhere and never touches the stream.
Stack: your choice with websockets, Postgres, Docker Compose.
A Session has a start time, a duration, and a list of participants who joined via a personal token link.
Question board, the centrepiece: anyone can post a question, anyone can upvote, and the presenter view is sorted by votes with answered questions collapsing to the bottom. Two details separate this from a chat window — a per-participant rate limit so one person cannot flood it, and near-duplicate detection at submission time that offers "this looks like an existing question, upvote it instead?" rather than creating a fourteenth version of the same thing.
Polls: multiple choice or scale, opened by the presenter with a countdown, closing automatically. Results render live as a bar chart and are frozen once closed. A participant who joins after a poll closed sees the result, not a chance to vote.
Presence: sample each connected participant every thirty seconds and store it. That sample stream is the source for everything below, and it is deliberately coarse — you need attendance, not surveillance.
Attendance certificates: from the presence data, compute each participant's attended minutes, and issue a PDF certificate only to those over a threshold you set, with their name, the session title, the date, the minutes attended and a verification code. Publish a page where the code can be checked. The point is that the certificate is derived from real presence rather than from registration.
One report: concurrent participants over time, question volume and answer rate, poll response rates, and the attendance distribution.
Export: questions and votes as CSV, presence samples as CSV, certificates as files.
Write tests for upvote idempotency per participant, for poll closing being irreversible, and for attended-minute computation with a participant who disconnects and rejoins.
Do not stream video and do not build a chat room — the question board is deliberately not a chat.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the video delivery, which is what the per-attendee price buys
- B.2 the integrated player and its second-by-second analytics
- B.3 real-time translated subtitles
- B.4 the CRM and marketing-automation integrations
- B.5 reliability when hundreds join at once
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: live media delivery
Because per-attendee pricing means you only pay when the event worked, and because nobody wants to explain to four hundred registrants why the stream froze.
Questions
Why a question board instead of chat?
Because chat during a webinar is noise that the presenter cannot act on, and upvoting turns the same audience into a ranked list of what they actually want answered. It is the one interaction pattern that improves a large session rather than distracting from it.
Are attendance certificates worth building?
For anything training-shaped, yes — they are frequently the reason someone stays to the end. Deriving them from presence samples rather than registration is what makes them mean anything.
Is presence sampling a privacy problem?
It is personal data, so say what you collect and keep it briefly. Sampling every thirty seconds is enough for attended-minute totals, which is why the prompt specifies a coarse interval instead of continuous tracking.
How does Livestorm's attendee-credit model actually work?
You buy a yearly pack and spend one credit per unique person per session, live or replay, over twelve months. The same person at two sessions costs two credits; your own team members do not consume credits. If you exhaust the pack, new attendees cannot join until you upgrade.
Related tools
Receipt