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# Jitsi Meet: A Self-Hosted Zoom Alternative
- URL: https://ditchthesaas.com/jitsi-meet-a-self-hosted-zoom-alternative/
- Published: 2026-09-20T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T03:51:14.000Z
- Description: Zoom's 40-minute limit is only on the free plan — Pro removes it for $16.99/host/month. For a small team, that adds up fast per host, and self-hosted Jitsi Meet removes both the time limit and the per-host bill.
- Author: Jordan Cole
- Tags: Self-Hosted Stack

Zoom's well-known 40-minute cutoff is a free-plan restriction only — Pro removes it, for $16.99 per host per month. For a 5-person team where everyone occasionally hosts their own calls, that's $84.95/month for something that's fundamentally just point-to-point video.

## The actual numbers

|             | Zoom Pro                  | Self-hosted Jitsi Meet       |
| ----------- | ------------------------- | ---------------------------- |
| 5-host team | $84.95/month (5 × $16.99) | $24.00/month (dedicated VPS) |

That's a **72% reduction**, and like the other per-seat tools on this site, the gap only grows as you add more people who need to host their own meetings — the VPS bill doesn't care how many hosts you have.

## What it takes to run

[Jitsi Meet](https://jitsi.org/?ref=ditchthesaas.com) is open-source, WebRTC-based video conferencing — no account required for participants, no per-host licensing, no time limit. It's more resource-hungry than most of what's on this site, though, because it's actually routing live audio and video, not serving static requests. For a small team's meeting sizes, 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM is the realistic floor — the same $24/month Vultr tier I've recommended for Chatwoot, not the lighter $6–$12/month instances that cover things like ntfy or Uptime Kuma. For meetings pushing past \~25 participants, budget for 4 vCPU / 8GB instead.

## What actually matters here: bandwidth and location

Zoom runs a globally distributed network of media relays, so a call between someone in Seattle and someone in Berlin routes through infrastructure near each of them. A single self-hosted Jitsi instance is one server in one location — pick a VPS region close to where most of your team actually is, or everyone eats the latency of routing through wherever you happened to deploy it. This matters more for video than it did for any of the other tools on this site; latency is something participants directly feel, not just a number in a dashboard.

Bandwidth matters too: budget roughly 200Mbps of headroom on the server side for a handful of simultaneous small-team calls. The $24/month Vultr tier's included bandwidth allowance covers this comfortably for normal small-team usage — just don't expect to run large all-hands video calls on it without sizing up.

## Where Zoom still wins

If your team spans multiple continents and video quality under load matters more than the bill, Zoom's global relay network is doing real work you'd have to replicate yourself (multiple regional servers, more complexity than this post covers). For a co-located or same-region small team doing normal day-to-day video calls, self-hosting removes both the time limit and the per-host cost without much practical downside.

I run mine on the same kind of [Vultr](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=9922680) instance I use for Chatwoot — see [the full cost roll-up](https://ditchthesaas.com/how-i-cut-my-saas-bill-by-90-by-self-hosting-everything/) for how the pieces fit together.

*Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Vultr. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to providers I actually use.*