How to calculate the monthly cost for Jitsi Meet in AWS infrastructure

AWS is the most commonly used cloud service provider in Jitsi deployment and this is due to its reliability, advanced features, and availability of cost-effective plans

Factors that determine your calculations

Calculating your overall AWS cost will be based upon few basic factors :

• A number of concurrent meetings and users.
• Distribution of meetings over a day/month
• The region where you wish to host your server

These factors dictate how much computing resources and bandwidth would be utilized and impacts your AWS monthly bill. Depending on your requirement, you might select a deployment with dedicated servers or with autoscaling. Autoscaling would be the best option if the concurrent users are more than 100.

We recommend the Jitsi meet deployment with the below severs types

1. Jitsi meet (including Jicofo and Prosody) - t3a medium
2. JVB - C5xlarge
3. HAProxy - t3a medium
4. Jibri

With Autoscaling scenarios, there will be a fixed cost plus variable cost which altogether make your monthly bill.

Fixed cost is the cost for the minimum number of servers that should be up during a whole period of time and variable cost will depend on the number of hours utilized.

Calculations will be as follows,

a = Number of t3a medium servers

b = Number of C5xlarge servers (Fixed)

c = Total Number of C5xlarge servers ( To handle the concurrent users)

x = Number of Hours

y = Number of days

Cost of t3a medium in US East (N. Virginia) = 0.0416 USD/hour Cost of C5xlarge in US East (N. Virginia) = 0.17 USD/hour

Refer AWS pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

For calculations

	Jitsi Meet	JVB
Fixed cost	0.041624 hours30 days*a	0.1724 hours30 days*b
Varible cost	No variable cost	0.17* x * y * (c-b)

Let's assume a use case of 500 concurrent users ( 10 users per room* 50 meeting rooms) over 2 hours per day *20 days per month, and infrastructure set in AWS servers US East (N. Virginia), your costs will be as below

In this case, if you use autoscaling, you will need 3 dedicated servers for JVB and 1 dedicated server for Jitsi Meet to be up all the time. Theoretically, to handle 500 concurrent users, it will need around 10 JVBs.

	Jitsi Meet	JVB	Total
Fixed cost	0.0416*24*30*1 = 29.952 USD	0.17*24*30*3 = 367.2 USD	397.152 USD
Varible cost	No variable cost	0.17* 2 * 20 * (10-3) = 47.6 USD	47.6 USD

Your monthly bill will be approximately 444.752 USD

With the same scenario, if you use dedicated servers

Then your cost would be as bellow,

	Jitsi Meet	JVB	Total
cost	0.04162430*1 = 29.952 USD	0.172430*10 = 1224 USD	1253.952 USD

Deciding on the above-mentioned leads to the next phase of calculation ie. a required number of JVB servers and shard.

• 100 - 500 Participants -

Keeping in mind and assuming that the number of users will increase that would create an impact on load, it is advised by our experts to auto-scale at the initial stage of building your video conferencing infrastructure. We recommend a requirement of at least a deployment of one shard for servers to function on demand when the number of users and the number of concurrent meetings keep fluctuating.

• 500 or More Participants -

A cluster of JVB servers together forms a shard, in which, two shards are required to withstand 500 or more participants in a meeting room. Also, the load between the shard should be balanced with the support of HAProxy.

If you want the best solution in setting up Jitsi Meet catering to your requirements, we are happy to help you with your infrastructure designing and deployment. Please reach out to us at hello@meetrix.io

Meetrix also provides after solutions service as monitoring, upgrading and any technical support as well. With our hands on years of experience with Jitsi launcher, our only goal is to meet all your requirements perfectly with our team of experts.