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 to do a ‘basic, free’ option. In order to maintain our platform, we do need paid memberships, to pay wages to 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?
For future reference, reposting this here: Meet.coop service levels and prices - #5 by mikemh