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