My name is Nicolás and I am a member of Fiqus, which is also part of FACTTIC, a federation of technology cooperatives.
I am writing here because together with other cooperatives in the federation we are working on a potential opportunity to organize a cooperative hackaton. In case the opportunity materializes, we would like to use the meet.coop service for participants to interact through an instance of Big Blue Button.
Therefore we are interested in knowing what the monthly / annual cost might be for the service. It is important to mention that we would need the room to support between 100 and 200 people connected at the same time (approximately).
I spoke with @chris to ask him, but he suggested that I should start a thread with this topic since you didn’t have the pricing of the service defined yet.
Finally, it’s important to mention that besides this particular opportunity, it would be very useful for us to know the costs since we would like to support a video call platform maintained by a cooperative so we don’t have to use Google or Zoom services as the only option.
Hi @nicolasdimarco! thanks for sharing your interest here.
At first sight the proposed Medium service level would seem to cover your needs. Notice that we are in the process of nailing down the service definition and this is so far a proposal.
As you mention one hackaton, maybe you would need the Medium service level just once and the price would be too high for you to maintain the whole year. We are also defining an event specific service proposition, as @benhylau suggests in the linked thread. Then the idea could be that you join as members and choose the service level you’d like for the whole year and additionally request the Events service just for a few days or so.
Yes, I think that if you have a kind of annual subscription, a monthly subscription and an event subscription it would be great. Since we could use the service when we need it.
Coming months should see a discussion of ‘free’ aka gift provision of platform services versus paid provision. Thus, reposting this comment and response.
I would have considered lowering the price / making it voluntarily for the lowest levels, with some extra features that could be payed for, like break out rooms and shared whiteboard.
All these features come in the bundle of BigBlueButton, as we find it available to us in the open source repo. We haven’t the developer time available to split out these functions. And personally, I’m not sure I would want meet.coop to do a ‘basic, free’ option at this stage of our coop’s development. In order to maintain our platform, we do need paid memberships, to cover wages for a core team.
This is a complex area, with conflicts - hence, something we need to look at in the dance of infrastructure. A combination of paid and gift provisions is clearly going to be involved in the infrastructure, from various kinds of providers, for various kinds of users? Welcome to the dance of infrastructure project
Using a service like meet.coop’s Big Blue Button for hosting sounds like a good idea, especially if you want to support a cooperative platform. Pricing can vary, so it’s a good call to start a thread to gather info. Hopefully, you’ll get some useful pricing details soon. It’s awesome that you’re exploring alternatives to Google and Zoom.