speaking from experience, forking out $50/Mo for a colo to self-host a communication platform really starts to get old when everyone's first question is "why don't we just use Discord"
I guess it can make sense if you're a business. But then the question is always "why don't we just use Teams"
It will always be cheaper to buy $1 if it's being sold for $0.30;
The trick as a business owner is:
* Will I be able to use this service until they rug pull?
* Will they exist for the life of my project?
* How painful will they make switching.
Paying $50/m for complete ownership of your video platform is not only comically low it's almost absurd. I pay more than that for SaaS tools like Fellow or Bonus.ly; that's before you start talking about Asana or Figma or the myriad of other tools.
That something is cheap is not an excuse, jitsi is very easy to use and easy to host. Though I will recommend going with 8x8 simply because it helps fund development and people are terrified of actually owning anything these days (because they said they didn't like sysadmins and now ops skills are worth spending 11x more for a service to not have in your company, which is another topic entirely).
You are off by a factor of 10 on your lower bound. A server capable of running Jitsi can be had for around 10$/month: https://www.kimsufi.com/en-gb/vps/.
I mean, I get the reference, but this amount of upscaling has a measurable cost in the real world, in this day and age (a small simulation from EC2's price calculator brings it from $40 to $80 a month if you go e.g. from t2.medium to t2.large).
I don't want to sound mean or unappreciative of jitsi developers' efforts, just highlighting that this kind of resource needs might put it out of reach of many potential users.
