[k_bx]

Sorry, I thought this is obvious, but I guess I have to re-state my question. The business model is unclear to me, they don't even make money on ads like Facebook, so it might be something worse.

What's the point for them to put all the money in?

[londt8]

8x8 uses Jitsi for their video calls. Therefore funding Jitsi improves their paid service. I hope this clarifies it.

[k_bx]

Doesn't make sense to me, sorry. I imagine paying for servers to run free Jitsi for all the people is tens of thousands of dollars per month (if not hundreds). Are you saying that it makes more sense than hiring additional developers for that money?

[barbs]

I don't think it's quite as expensive as you might think. Unfortunately I don't have sources right now but from memory the server component mostly handles session management.

Will try dig up some posts...

EDIT: Looks like one person self-hosted an instance on a Hetzner cloud instance for 2,49€ a month. https://dev.to/noandrea/self-hosted-jitsi-server-with-authen...

Regarding the official Jitsi meet site: "On a plain Xeon server (like this one) that you can rent for about a hundred dollars, for about 20% CPU you will be able to run 1000+ video streams using an average of 550 Mbps!"

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-videobridge-performance-evaluation/

I'm not a backend guy so not sure if this takes everything into account.