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Comment by owens99 | Hacker News Reader

That’s way too expensive. My $80/month server bill can support millions of users per month but would only get me <300 MAUs on this service?

Edit: my guess is I misunderstood who they are targeting with this. Thought they were targeting developers who want to integrate Jitsi with an existing product.

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Personally, I feel like this is really generous pricing

Compare it to, e.g. Slack (https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb) or Zoom (https://zoom.us/pricing)

Notwithstanding any accounting issues raised by worble, which I'm sure will be ironed out over time

They must be targeting people who just want to use this for internal purposes, rather than developers who want to integrate Jitsi with an existing product.

Yes, exactly. This offering is a Zoom alternative

(Jitsi Dev here) Most of our customers are actually developers and that's how the service is intended. Hope this helps

This is like people saying fastmail pricing is reasonable because other providers gyp you too.

it isn't? i used it for years and been very happy.

The marginal cost of the service they provide is like 10% of what they charge, or even less.

Do you go to restaurants expecting to pay only the total cost of ingredients for your meal? Fastmail provides an excellent service and if anything I feel as though I underpay for what I'm getting. I'm happy to know they have a healthy margin to pay their developers from and improve the product.

I expect to pay a reasonable price. Being overcharged by 90% is not reasonable.

Restaurants charge 4-5x the cost of ingredients. So I take it you never eat out?

I have worked in one and no they don't. Most restaurants barely break even by the end of the month once you factor in all costs (like employees, rent...), which I did in the example of fastmail.

You said marginal cost which is not all costs. Marginal cost is equivalent to ingredients and does not include fixed costs which likely make up the majority fo their expenses.

If you believe this, start a competing service. There is no moral or practical rule that forces prices down to cost without external reason. If Fastmail is making big bucks, and customers are happy with the price, that's good for everyone.

Any good alternatives you could recommend?

I don't get it, what's wrong with fastmail's pricing? I've been a customer for years and never thought much about it.

Millions of users per month doing video conferencing?

Of course not

No. I meant for a normal SPA or CRUD app without video.

Then what are you trying to compare? The pricing includes all video traffic relaying, which is the non-trivial part of these types of setups.

Not the best comparison. Probably depends on your use-case.

How much does it cost to setup and maintain the platform (actually reachable from end users) 24/24 at 99.99 ? Global infra ? Dealing with HIPAA/GDPR ?

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