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JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

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Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#72

I really like Jitsi. I've been running it on a Digital Ocean droplet for my own use. The one feature I've been missing is remote control during a screen sharing session. I understand it was removed for security reasons ( https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/issues/431 ). Are there any plans to implement the feature again in the future? Thanks!

Yes, it will come back. We have so many things in our plate that not everything can be acted upon in a timely manner. Don't despair :-)

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#73
post #66

Jitsi is great and we've been using it for some time. We switched from a custom WebRTC because error handling becomes too complex with browser permissions and connection. It does work much better, however there are still a few times that video just doesn't work, with no way to debug why

Would love to hear more about those problems. Have you opened GH issues / community posts?

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#75
post #28

Looking for pricing, I get to this page: https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video >We're charging on a Monthly Active User (MAU) >Pricing starts at $0.35/MAU and decreases based on volume. >An MAU is defined as a unique user who attended at least one meeting, with at least one other user, in the same month. To determine a unique user, we store an identifier on the device's local storage, and that will remain the same…

Pricing for real-time video is hard. There are pretty large variable costs to run a service like this.

WebRTC is peer-to-peer, architecturally. But if you run the service you pay for bandwidth for users behind firewalls (because you need to forward the audio/video through TURN servers) and for calls with more than 3 or 4 people (because you need to offload some of the cpu/bandwidth from the clients).

Bandwidth and media server CPU set the floor for what you need to charge.

As a SaaS, you can charge per or charge per . Each pricing model is good for a different subset of your customers. With fairly large variable costs, usage-based pricing is easier to model for you, but not necessarily for your customers.

For example, your (developer) customers that charge a flat rate per "seat" per month for their products will have trouble projecting what their margin will be if you charge them per video minute.

The industry Jitsi/8x8 competes in is gradually moving towards $0.0015/minute as the rough cost of video for customers with significant volume. So one way to look at Jitsi's pricing model is that they are projecting an average of ~4 hours of video per month per unique user. ($0.35 / $0.0015 / 60). Which seems ... low?

This is separate from the question above about how they track unique users, which I agree is really interesting!

Also, and again separately from Jitsi, there's also a long history of not-so-transparent pricing in the telecommunications world. One of the major SaaS video platforms advertises peer-to-peer calls as free on their service. And they are, if you don't count the TURN bandwidth they bill you for.

(Disclaimer: as the cofounder of Daily.co, a YC company that competes with this Jitsi service, I think about variable vs per-user pricing way too much. tldr; we can almost always do better for you than any of our competitors, partly because we're happy to talk to you and put together custom pricing based on your use case. But it's also true that most of our customers, especially our largest customers, don't select us primarily based on price. Empirically, we win on ease of use, video quality, API flexibility, and developer support. So under-pricing isn't an optimal business strategy, either.)

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#78
post #72

I really like Jitsi. I've been running it on a Digital Ocean droplet for my own use. The one feature I've been missing is remote control during a screen sharing session. I understand it was removed for security reasons ( https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/issues/431 ). Are there any plans to implement the feature again in the future? Thanks!

Yes, it will come back. We have so many things in our plate that not everything can be acted upon in a timely manner. Don't despair :-)

Awesome, thanks for the reply.

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#79
post #77

What is the screen sharing performance of this like? When I tried to set up the Jitsi integration for Mattermost earlier this week, even with only 3 people in a call, we could not get the stream over 1-2 fps. Discord handles native-res 60fps streaming.

When running from a browser, Chrome specially lowers the framerate and prefers higher resolution. Not sure we can tune it for high fps.

Re: JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you

#80
post #33
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there! Jitsi dev here. What do you have in mind? Feel free to contact us at: jaastech@8x8.com

Something with an API similar to Vonage/Tokbox or Twilio video.

Gotcha. We are thinking about that. Please reach out to us and let's talk about it: jaastech@8x8.com
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