This is a short Blog to allow you to understand the Basic High-Level Differences between BigBlueButton & other B2C Video Conferencing or Meeting Platforms.
How do you calculate the cost?
Zoom / Gmeet / Teams all these have License Based Cost, more number of Teachers or Host accounts required the Cost is more.
Example: A Institution having more than 500 Full-time or Part-time employees but not necessarily all these Staff holds daily Online Conferencing / Meetings / Classes altogether. Maybe only 25-50 Teachers or Staff take classes at the same time during Working Hours. But still, the Institution pays for all 500 Licenses for the whole Month or Year, whereas Zoom License Cost Stands at around $15 / Month / License,
Total Monthly Zoom License Cost would be around 500 * 15 = $7500 / Month
Whereas for the same Use-case the BigBlueButton doesn’t have any License Cost as it is an Open-source Solution but it has the Infrastructure or Hosting Cost which we can’t avoid. Bigbluebutton Infrastructure Cost fully depends on How many users are connecting at the Same Time. It doesn’t matter how many students or teachers the Institution has in Total, only it depends heavily on No of Concurrent Users including Teachers & Students who connected or Joined the Sessions simultaneously.
We are assuming only 50 Teachers are Holding classes with on average 10 Students each.
Total Concurrent Users = 50 Sessions * (1 Teacher +10 Students ) = 550 Users
So the Institution having a Bigbluebutton Infrastructure for 600 concurrent users should be enough to take the Daily loads of all the Classes.
Bigbluebutton Infrastructure Setup, Hosting & Maintenance Cost for 550 Concurrent Users:
One-time Setup Cost for the above BBB Infrasturc on Self-hosted Servers: $300
Monthly AWS / Azure / GCP Hosting or Infrastructure Cost: $1500 / Month
Data Transfer or Bandwidth Cost (More usage requires more Data Transfer): 50 TB Data Transfer Cost is around $4000 / Month
Maintenance Cost or Technical Person responsible for managing the Infrastructure will add some Cost around at least $200 / Month for a part-time or outsourced professional.
Instead of AWS / Azure / GCP, using Digital Ocean as a Cloud Infrastructure the Data Transfer Cost comes down to a certain extent around $500 only
AWS Outbound Data Transfer Cost @ $75 / TB , Digital Ocean Data Transfer Cost @ $10 / TB , Bigbluebutton Host Data Transfer Cost @ $3 / TB
But we recommend using Fully ManagedBigbluebutton Service where all Setup & Maintainance are done by Professionals without any Additional Cost along with Technical Support.
Our Monthly Plan costs only $750 for 550 Concurrent Users. Contact Us for Exact estimation depending on your use case. We don’t charge additional Data Transfer Costs unless usage is very high. Schedule a Call for the Use-case analysis here .
Production Grade Bigbluebutton Infrastructure Costs less with our Managed Hosting than the Self-hosted BBB Setup.
Also, we provide Onetime Services like Self-hosted Setup of Bigbluebutton Infrastructure,
