Understanding Jitsi infrastructure setup cost

This blog is usually accompanied by a quote from Meetrix. This guide will help you understand it better. This is just a 5-minute read, but worth hours of self-research.

What is a shard?

A shard is a group of servers that work together to auto-scale (or sometimes work without auto-scaling) and supports up to 500 concurrent users. These users are typically distributed among multiple conferences.

i.e. There are 10 sessions at 8 am, each session has ~50 participants, which means there is a total of 500 users in the system.

We only set up about 500 concurrent users per shard because more users would create bottlenecks at the prosody module, and crash the system.

What servers are set up within a shard?

A shard consist of one Jitsi Meet Server ( for Prosody and Jicofo ), 2-10 JVBs, 0-20 Jibri servers and 1-2 Jigasi Servers. If your setup includes multiple shards, 1-2 HA prosy servers will be included in the setup to load balance traffic between shards.

What costs will I incur per shard?

these are payments you make to your hosting provider, not Meetrix. We only charge for the setup of infrastructure and if you need for monthly maintenance

• Always on servers:

  • One HA Proxy server and one Jitsi Meet server would be set up on two 2 core, 4 GB RAM (t3a medium) machines. The monthly cost would be approximately USD $0.05 x 24 hrs x 30 days into 2 servers per month on AWS which is about USD 72 a month.
  • At least 2 JVBs would be set up to be always on. This is typically a 4 core 8GB ram (C5 xlarge) machine.
  • If you need recording, 1 Jibri server would be set up to be always on. This is typically a 2 core, 4 GB RAM (t3a medium) ram machine.

• Load based auto-scaled servers:

  • The additional cost may be added to the monthly bill for auto-scaling JVBs and Jibris. Add about 10% of the always-on cost for JVBs and Jibris to get an idea of this cost. But it might be vastly different according to actual usage.
    * All providers have data bandwidth out and sometimes in pricing. Usually, this limit is not exceeded unless for high intensive applications and this would also impact your monthly bill.

Why is there a separate price given for JVB setup and Jibri setup?

Configuration of these servers, JVB, and Jibri are vastly different from each other and their auto-scaling mechanisms are different. Hence our workload dictates we set up these servers separately, and hence the cost is separate. Also, some clients would not need recording, hence we separate pricing.

What is JWT token authentication?

Sometimes you might want to authenticate moderators and participants from a user management system such as a website, CRM, or ERP. This will secure your meetings against your users via a secure JWT token.

Is my setup a single region setup or a multi-region setup?

Most likely you will have users join from one region i.e. USA. But if you have a high volume of users from another region like Europe, we can also set up shards in Europe to reduce latency and improve your conference quality. But if you are using a high end cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or Azure, even a single region setup would be enough if you only have a very few users from other regions joining a conference. We also setup Octo for multi-region setups.

Which browsers support Jitsi meet conferences

Desktop browsers

Browser	Support	Notes
Chromium based		Generally we support the current stable - 10 versions
Firefox		Generally we support current ESR - 1 versions
Safari
Internet Explorer

Mobile browsers

Browser	Support	Notes
Chromium based (Android)
Firefox (Android)
Safari (iOS)
Other iOS browsers using WKWebView		Supported on iOS >= 14.3

Reference : Supported browsers\·Jitsi Meet Handbook