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Looking for pricing, I get to this page: https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video >We're charging on a Monthly Active Us

by worble 6y ago

Looking for pricing, I get to this page: https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video 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 as long as the user uses the same browser and same device and doesn't clear their local cache data. Mobile is similar. An identifier remains across updates and gets removed if you delete the app. So does that mean that if they are running Cookie AutoDelete or Temporary Containers addons, or simply clear all their browser data after exiting, any single user could easily eat all your user limit if they just repeatedly connected to the service? Or, even just having a single person connect on their desktop, laptop and phone once would eat 3 of your licenses?

owens99 6y ago
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.
- saghul 6y ago
  Millions of users per month doing video conferencing?
  - owens99 6y ago
    No. I meant for a normal SPA or CRUD app without video.
    - saghul 6y ago
      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.
  - jamespo 6y ago
    Of course not
- jrh206 6y ago
  Personally, I feel like this is really generous pricing Compare it to, e.g. Slack (https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb) or Zoom (https://zoom.us/pricing https://zoom.us/pricing) Notwithstanding any accounting issues raised by worble, which I'm sure will be ironed out over time
  - glaive123 6y ago
    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.
    - jrh206 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. This offering is a Zoom alternative
    - emcho 6y ago
      (Jitsi Dev here) Most of our customers are actually developers and that's how the service is intended. Hope this helps
  - eznzt 6y ago
    This is like people saying fastmail pricing is reasonable because other providers gyp you too.
    - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
      it isn't? i used it for years and been very happy.
      - eznzt 6y ago
        The marginal cost of the service they provide is like 10% of what they charge, or even less.
        6y ago
- cryptonym 6y ago
  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 ?
philipps 6y ago
I would still like to see an answer to the questions above. In particular, does a user who connects on three devices count as three MAUs?
- Spare_account 6y ago
  If MAUs is hard, then don't use MAU as a billing metric? Charge for concurrent connections or by the minute maybe?
- avianlyric 6y ago
  Sounds like it. But at 35cents / month, that doesn’t sound like a bad outcome.
kwindla 6y ago
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 <usage> or charge per <user>. 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.)
- jefftk 6y ago
  I'm currently using Twilio for echo.jefftk.com, and paying $0.004/minute (I'm very low volume). I was considering switching to this, but their pricing is a terrible fit for my "most calls have mostly people who've never used it before" situation.
emcho 6y ago
(Jitsi Dev here) Yes you are correct. Cookie delete is indeed something that would trigger a new user count. So far we haven't seen this happen but if you believe your users would be massively cleaning cookies, we are happy to have a conversation and find a work around for you.
- sandGorgon 6y ago
  Do consider pricing on the peak number of simultaneous streams (like Pusher.com does)
- Stephen304 6y ago
  FWIW, me and my team would likely be super into paying for a hosted Jitsi if there was another pricing structure. We run our own but keeping it running smoothly takes away dev energy. Counting usage like this just seems very ripe for abuse by anybody who wishes to harm the group.
  - saghul 6y ago
    Please do reach out to us, we just got started and are happy to discuss.
thedracle 6y ago
Jitsi is open source, so you can look at the exact mechanics of their billing counter to answer your question: It's all orchestrated from here: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/react/features/billing-counter/ https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/react/featur... Which generates the MAU ID via: react/features/billing-counter/functions.js:80 /* * Returns the stored billing id (or generates a new one if none is present). * * @returns {string} */ export function getBillingId() { let billingId = jitsiLocalStorage.getItem(BILLING_ID); if (!billingId) { billingId = uuid.v4(); jitsiLocalStorage.setItem(BILLING_ID, billingId); } return billingId; }

by worble 6y ago

owens99 6y ago

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.

saghul 6y ago
Millions of users per month doing video conferencing?
- owens99 6y ago
  No. I meant for a normal SPA or CRUD app without video.
  - saghul 6y ago
    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.
- jamespo 6y ago
  Of course not
jrh206 6y ago
Personally, I feel like this is really generous pricing Compare it to, e.g. Slack (https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb) or Zoom (https://zoom.us/pricing https://zoom.us/pricing) Notwithstanding any accounting issues raised by worble, which I'm sure will be ironed out over time
- glaive123 6y ago
  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.
  - jrh206 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. This offering is a Zoom alternative
  - emcho 6y ago
    (Jitsi Dev here) Most of our customers are actually developers and that's how the service is intended. Hope this helps
- eznzt 6y ago
  This is like people saying fastmail pricing is reasonable because other providers gyp you too.
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    it isn't? i used it for years and been very happy.
    - eznzt 6y ago
      The marginal cost of the service they provide is like 10% of what they charge, or even less.
      - 6y ago
cryptonym 6y ago
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 ?

philipps 6y ago

I would still like to see an answer to the questions above. In particular, does a user who connects on three devices count as three MAUs?

Spare_account 6y ago
If MAUs is hard, then don't use MAU as a billing metric? Charge for concurrent connections or by the minute maybe?
avianlyric 6y ago
Sounds like it. But at 35cents / month, that doesn’t sound like a bad outcome.

kwindla 6y ago

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 <usage> or charge per <user>. 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.)

jefftk 6y ago
I'm currently using Twilio for echo.jefftk.com, and paying $0.004/minute (I'm very low volume). I was considering switching to this, but their pricing is a terrible fit for my "most calls have mostly people who've never used it before" situation.

emcho 6y ago

(Jitsi Dev here) Yes you are correct. Cookie delete is indeed something that would trigger a new user count. So far we haven't seen this happen but if you believe your users would be massively cleaning cookies, we are happy to have a conversation and find a work around for you.

sandGorgon 6y ago
Do consider pricing on the peak number of simultaneous streams (like Pusher.com does)
Stephen304 6y ago
FWIW, me and my team would likely be super into paying for a hosted Jitsi if there was another pricing structure. We run our own but keeping it running smoothly takes away dev energy. Counting usage like this just seems very ripe for abuse by anybody who wishes to harm the group.
- saghul 6y ago
  Please do reach out to us, we just got started and are happy to discuss.

thedracle 6y ago

Jitsi is open source, so you can look at the exact mechanics of their billing counter to answer your question: It's all orchestrated from here: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/react/features/billing-counter/ https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/react/featur... Which generates the MAU ID via: react/features/billing-counter/functions.js:80 /* * Returns the stored billing id (or generates a new one if none is present). * * @returns {string} */ export function getBillingId() { let billingId = jitsiLocalStorage.getItem(BILLING_ID); if (!billingId) { billingId = uuid.v4(); jitsiLocalStorage.setItem(BILLING_ID, billingId); } return billingId; }