6 posts tagged with "open-source"

How much does your video conferencing solution really cost? The answer is often more complex than just the number on your monthly bill.

For businesses evaluating a video platform, the choice between a public SaaS provider (like Zoom or Google Meet) and a self-hosted solution (like plugNmeet) often comes down to a calculation of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). While SaaS pricing seems simple at first, it hides long-term costs that can stifle growth. Conversely, self-hosting has a different cost structure—one that offers predictability, control, and significant savings at scale.

This article will break down the true TCO of both models to help you make a smarter, more strategic decision.

For most businesses, video conferencing is a utility, like electricity or water. You sign up for a service like Zoom or Google Meet, pay a monthly fee, and use it for your internal meetings. You are, in effect, renting your video solution. And for many use cases, that's perfectly fine.

But what happens when video is more than just a utility? What happens when it's a core part of your product, your customer experience, or your brand identity?

Suddenly, renting becomes a strategic liability. You're building a critical part of your business on a platform you don't control, using an interface that looks just like your competitors', and sending your valuable user data to a third party.

This is why smart businesses are moving from renting their video solution to owning it. By leveraging powerful, self-hosted platforms like plugNmeet, they are transforming video from a simple utility into a strategic asset and a powerful competitive advantage.

When you search for "free video conferencing," you're looking for a simple, cost-effective way to connect with your team, clients, or community. The internet is full of "free" tiers from major SaaS providers, and they seem like the perfect solution.

But what is the true cost of "free"?

Too often, the price isn't on the invoice; it's hidden in the terms of service. You pay with your data, your brand identity, and your control. This article explores the hidden costs of "free" video conferencing and introduces a better, more empowering alternative.

For years, our company has been a well-known provider of BigBlueButton hosting and support services. We've deployed, managed, and scaled it for countless clients, and we have a deep respect for the role it has played in the open-source education community. It paved the way.

But after years in the trenches, supporting live sessions, online classes, and events at scale, we found ourselves running into the same fundamental walls. We weren't just using the software; we were experiencing its architectural limits firsthand. The frustration wasn't just about bugs; it was about an architecture that, while powerful for its original purpose, presented challenges for the kind of elastic scalability and developer agility that modern web applications demand.

We realized we had a choice: continue building workarounds, or take everything we had learned and build the solution we knew our users needed.

We chose to build. This is the story of why Plug-N-Meet exists.

When you search for open source webinar software, you're looking for more than just a way to talk to people online. You're looking for control. You want to own your brand, manage your audience, and create a unique, professional presentation without being locked into the expensive, rigid ecosystem of proprietary tools like Zoom Webinars or GoToWebinar.

Many open-source projects offer a basic meeting experience. But a webinar is not just a meeting. It has a different structure, different roles, and different goals. You need a platform that understands this distinction.

At plugNmeet, we believe the best webinar experience isn't a one-size-fits-all tool. It's a flexible, API-first platform that gives you the building blocks to create the exact webinar workflow you need. This article explains how.

Every great application is built on a foundation of smart architectural choices. For a real-time video conferencing platform, these choices are the difference between a smooth, reliable experience and a frustrating mess of lag, dropped calls, and connection errors.

When we designed plugNmeet, we had a clear set of goals: the platform needed to be high-performance, horizontally scalable, resilient, and easy for developers to build upon. This led us to make two fundamental decisions for our backend: we chose LiveKit for our media server and NATS for our real-time messaging layer.

This article is a deep dive into the "why" behind these critical choices.