Self-hosted BigBlueButton Cost Calculator
BigBlueButton Self-Hosted Cost Calculator to estimate your hosting costs on Amazon Web Services(one of the best and popular Cloud provider). Get an instant breakdown of AWS computing expenses based on your requirements.
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Notes:
1. Above pricing calculation is only for the computing needs or EC2 Instances provided by AWS, which doesn't cover the Storage, Elastic IP, Network Bandwidth or Data Transfer cost etc.
2. We have used the Recording usage parameter to calculate the coputing resources only which will be consumed to process the recording, to store the recordings you have to count cost seperately, also for viewing recordings there might be Data Transfer costs.
3. For other major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud etc. overall costs will look similar, we have choosen AWS as the most popular cloud service provider.
Disclaimer:
1. Estimated costs above does not guarantee anything. No responsibility taken if AWS or other cloud providers charges more than the estimated cost.
2. For this calculation we have used us-east-2 or US East (Ohio) Region, assumed ideal participation. In real-world scenario it may differ.
Other Immediate Costs for Self-hosted BigBlueButton
Above AWS pricing calculation is only for the computing needs or EC2 Instances.
But there are several other costs for a production ready BigBlueButton infrastruture.
Installation & Maintenance
There will be an one-time installation and monthly maintenance(optional) costs for smooth experience.
Recording Storage
For storing recordings Elastic Block Storage service will cost around 40 USD / month for 500 GB volume.
Data Transfer Cost
AWS charges for out-bound data transfer starts from 0.09 / GB, means more add-on costs for your usage.
Other Hidden Costs for Self-hosted BigBlueButton
For smaller infrastructure below costs might be ignored, but these can be crucial for a large scale production deployment with few hundreds or thousands of concurrent users.
Expert Consultation
To use BigBlueButton to it's full potential you have to hire an expert for regular maintenance & guidence.
Opportunity Cost
You may run into problems due to lack of maintenace, so it may incur some opportunity cost indirectly.
Technical Support
With self-hosted infrastructure, you have no one to reach out for any issues or queries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Kindly explore the related FAQs below, before you reach out for support.
Most of your questions are probably already answered.
Self-hosted BigBlueButton related FAQs
YES, but be very clear to yourself, why you need to self-host BigBlueButton, what additional benifits it brings to you.
If you have valid reasons, you should consider self-hosting BigBlueButton infrastructure.
If you just want the BigBlueButton up & running on your AWS instance you should count these below costs at least.
1. One-time deployment cost(between 20-100 USD) or time
2. AWS c5.2xlarge EC2 instance , On-demand cost 244 USD / Month
3. Without Recording 50 GB EBS Boot volume @4 USD / Month
  OR
  With Regular Recording 500 GB EBS Volume @ 40 USD / Month
4. Outbound Data Transfer or Bandwidth Usage Cost
  No Usage = No Cost
  Average 2 hours daily sessions with 80 participants accross multiple sessions for 20 days / Month,
  would consume around 4 TB / Month outbound Data Transfer.
  This 4TB outbound data transfer wopuld cost you (4096*0.09 / GB) =~ 368 USD / MonthÂ
  More Usage = More Cost
For 100 concurrent users & above assumed use case, AWS monthly bill should be around total 650 USD.
Note: For this calculation we have used AWS Ohio Region, assumed ideal usage & active media consumption by participants. In real-world scenario it may differ.
Other cost for Professional Services like Regular Maintenance, Updates & Upgrades, Technical Support etc you may ignore for a non-production deployment or a Hobby project. For example , we do maintenance of the Standalone self-hosted BigBlueButton server for 50 USD / Month, billed annually.
YES, definately if you have at least 5K USD credit, and you don’t have a good way to use it.
You can definately use that for the BigBlueButton infrastructure. But if your usage is really high, most of your credit will be utilised in just a few months.
If your usage is less but you need a BigBlueButton deployment for occasional usage, we recommend deploying there.Â
No, we don’t charge extra for Bandwidth or usage.
We actually offer unlimited usage, means you pay the fixed monthly cost irrespective of your usage.
Self-hosted BigBlueButton vs Our Managed Hosting Plans
Self-hosted is not always the Best decision. Be very clear to yourself, why you need to self-host BigBlueButton, what additional benifits it brings to you.
Consider Self-hosted infrastructure only if necessary.
You shouldn’t end up with an expensive, abandoned infrastructure with older version installed without any maintenance or updates for months or years.
You take charge of the BigBlueButton infrastructure yourself, no one else is accountable for anything.
- Self-hosted BigBlueButton will cost you more.
- We don’t charge extra for Outbound Data Transfer, but they do.
- Do it yourself, if you want to learn, else you may use your time better.
- Mostly self-hosted deployments runs older versions without any updates.
- Mostly self-hosted infrastructure runs with default, out of box configuration.
- Without any monitoring your infrastructure may get overloaded & cause issues.
Though we recommend managed hosting plans, but it still make sense to consider self-hosted BigBlueButton for the following reasons.
- It is a short-term event specifc experimental project.
- For Testing and Development without any production use case.
- Third party vendors aren’t allowed for a government funded project.
- Your company already has the required Infrastructure, DevOps Engineers.
- Existing Free Azure or AWS Credits, to run BigBlueButton for a few months.
- You are bound to follow the company policy that restricts outsourcing services.
- Infrastructure will be so large, that you can hire a full-time DevOps team to manage.
We can help with below services
- Deployment or installation of the BigBlueButton project into your provided infrastructure.
- Maintenance of your Self-hosted infrastruture with a monthly cost & annual billing.
- On-demand Technical Support, consultation.
- Migration or capacity upgradation or scaling up.
- Custom implementation like external recordings backup etc.