TURN Costs Money

This page is early on purpose. Everything else in Beam is free to run; a relay is not, and the first call that needs one will be a customer's, not yours.

Why a call needs a relay

Two browsers on the open internet connect directly once STUN has told each its public address. Behind symmetric NAT, a corporate firewall or most mobile carriers, there is no direct path: every packet has to go through a TURN server that both sides can reach. In practice that is roughly one call in five — and never one of the calls you place while testing, because two browsers on the same network always find a direct path. The failing ones are a customer's, on a phone or behind an office firewall.

Without a TURN driver those calls fail, and they fail quietly: the browsers exchange offers, gather candidates, and never connect. beam:doctor warns about it; this page says it first.

What it costs

A relayed call sends every byte of audio and video through your relay, in both directions. Budget roughly:

• Audio only: ~50–100 kbit/s per direction.
• Video (640×480): ~500 kbit/s – 1 Mbit/s per direction.
• Screen share: similar to video; more for busy screens.

So a relayed one-hour video call is in the region of 500 MB–1 GB of relay bandwidth. Cloud relays bill per gigabyte; a self-hosted coturn costs a small VM and its egress.

The drivers

Beam ships four, and adding your own is a class:

Driver	What it is	Set up
coturn	Self-hosted, open source, one shared secret	a VM, two ports, COTURN_URLS and COTURN_SECRET
cloudflare	Cloudflare Realtime TURN	a key id and an API token
twilio	Twilio Network Traversal Service	account SID and auth token
metered	Metered.ca TURN	app name and API key

Every driver mints a per-participant, time-limited credential on the server at ring() time and folds it into the token. A relay's secret or API key never reaches a browser, and Redactor keeps credentials out of your logs.

BEAM_TURN=coturn
COTURN_URLS=turn:turn.yourapp.com:3478,turns:turn.yourapp.com:5349
COTURN_SECRET=change-me

Switching providers is one line. Nothing in your PHP or JavaScript mentions a relay.

Check it before a customer does

php artisan beam:doctor

The TURN line mints a credential through your driver and connects to every relay host it names. If minting fails, the driver's keys are wrong; if a host does not answer, its ports are closed. Beam also fires TurnUnavailable when a driver throws during a ring, and the call still goes ahead on STUN alone — degraded, not dead.

When you can skip it

If every caller is on the same corporate network, or you are running a demo on one Wi-Fi, STUN alone connects. Everywhere else, put a relay in before you go live.

Made with ❤️ from Pakistan