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Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain how Jitsi is funded? Who's paying for the resources? Seems unwise to use software like that that's provided for free.

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From the FAQ : "We are fortunate that our friends at 8×8 fully fund the project. 8×8 uses Jitsi technology in products like Virtual Office. The open source community and meet.jit.si service help to make Jitsi better, which makes 8×8 products better, which helps to further fund Jitsi. This virtuous cycle has worked well in the past and should continue to for many years to come."

If Facebook would be ads-free, free, and open-source, would you use it? I'd be scared as hell. Imagine this line:

> We are fortunate that our friends at GoodCorp fully fund the project. GoodCorp uses Facebook technology in products like GoodCorp Social. The open source community and meet.facebook.com service help to make Facebook better, which makes GoodCorp products better, which helps to further fund Facebook. This virtuous cycle has worked well in the past and should continue to for many years to come."

And keep in mind that Jitsi seems like a more resource-hungry product (real-time video).

Jitsi being open source removes a lot of that scare.

5 seconds of research yields this: https://jitsi.org/built-on-jitsi/#partners

Sorry, I thought this is obvious, but I guess I have to re-state my question. The business model is unclear to me, they don't even make money on ads like Facebook, so it might be something worse.

What's the point for them to put all the money in?

8x8 uses Jitsi for their video calls. Therefore funding Jitsi improves their paid service. I hope this clarifies it.

Doesn't make sense to me, sorry. I imagine paying for servers to run free Jitsi for all the people is tens of thousands of dollars per month (if not hundreds). Are you saying that it makes more sense than hiring additional developers for that money?

I don't think it's quite as expensive as you might think. Unfortunately I don't have sources right now but from memory the server component mostly handles session management.

Will try dig up some posts...

EDIT: Looks like one person self-hosted an instance on a Hetzner cloud instance for 2,49€ a month. https://dev.to/noandrea/self-hosted-jitsi-server-with-authen...

Regarding the official Jitsi meet site: "On a plain Xeon server (like this one) that you can rent for about a hundred dollars, for about 20% CPU you will be able to run 1000+ video streams using an average of 550 Mbps!"

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-videobridge-performance-evaluation/

I'm not a backend guy so not sure if this takes everything into account.

Don't know about owners and such but you can set up your own server if needed.

Yeah, that'd cost you a substantial amount, probably more than paying for a Zoom subscription. Now imagine someone is just paying for you, for free, no ads. Isn't that weird? All I'm saying.

For small-medium groups, it runs just fine on a VPS that's half the price of a single paid Zoom account.

Alright everyone time to tear down all your Linux and Postgres servers...

Would you be willing to pay my AWS bills? It'll improve the open-source community!

No because you don't have a useful open source project. Otherwise you'd already have a sponsor

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