A comparison of hosted video platforms for 1:1 and small-group tutoring (up to 4 students), mostly in Turkey, where math teachers need a whiteboard. Self-hosting was ruled out. The prices come from each vendor's public price list.
BigBlueButton is built for classrooms. The shared whiteboard, PDF slides, recording and a Turkish interface all come built in, it costs the least at both sizes, and our backend already expects it. JaaS is easier to embed but charges extra for every recorded minute. The per-minute video APIs (Daily, LiveKit and others) give us more control over the design but cost more, and we'd have to build the lesson screen and whiteboard ourselves.
≈ $45 /mo now · $169–259 /mo at 200 teachers
$99 /mo → $499 /mo · recording +$0.01/min
≈ $150 /mo → ≈ $1,280 /mo (incl. data transfer)
Two scenarios: Now is 20 teachers and 800 lesson-hours a month; Growth is 200 teachers and 8,000 lesson-hours. Both assume 3 people per lesson (teacher + 2 students). Details are under Assumptions.
€ prices converted at €1 ≈ $1.10 for the chart only. Prices marked * are from the vendor's list but need a sales call to confirm (beta pricing, or an unusually low rate).
| Platform | Pricing model | Now | Now + rec. | Growth | Growth + rec. |
|---|
| Platform | Whiteboard | Ready-made lesson screen | Recording | EU data | Turkish UI | Our build effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BigBlueButton (hosted) | Built in, strong | Yes | Included | Depends on host | Yes | ~3–5 days |
| Jitsi · 8x8 JaaS | Built in, basic | Yes | $0.01/min | Unconfirmed | Yes | ~3–5 days |
| Digital Samba | Built in | Yes | €0.010–0.013/min | EU only | Check | ~3–5 days |
| Daily Prebuilt | Add ourselves | Yes | $0.0135/min | Unconfirmed | Check | ~1–2 weeks |
| Whereby Embedded | Basic | Yes | $0.01/min | EU company | Check | ~1 week |
| LiveKit Cloud | Add ourselves | Build it | $0.02/min | Scale plan | Build it | ~3–6 weeks |
| Agora | Separate SDK | Build it | Unconfirmed | China-linked HQ | Build it | ~3–6 weeks |
| Google Meet (today) | None | Separate app | Workspace only | Workspace terms | Yes | Done (pasted links) |
Build effort means work on DersOfisim: creating rooms from our backend, a signed join link per student, and the Join button on the lesson. It doesn't include recordings in the app.
Open-source software built for online classes. Many companies host it. They all offer the same API: our backend creates a meeting with a shared secret and gives each person a signed join link, so moving to another host is mostly a settings change.
Priced by monthly active users (anyone who joined a call with someone else that month). Tiers: Developer free (25 users), Basic $99 (300), Standard $499 (1,500), Business $999 (3,000). Each extra user is $0.99. Add-ons: recording $0.01/min, transcription $0.06/min.
The free public meet.jit.si can't be used: it now requires a login, and 8x8 directs commercial embedding to JaaS.
Ship $50 (150k participant-min included), Scale $500 (1.5M included), then $0.0004–0.0005/min. Data transfer: 250 GB / 3 TB included, then $0.12 / $0.10 per GB. Video recording $0.02/min. Pinning data to a region (EU) needs Scale or higher.
Free up to 10k minutes, Create €99 (25k), Launch €372 (100k), Grow €1,700 (500k), Scale €3,000 (1M). Extra minutes €0.0030–0.0040. Recording €0.0098–0.0130/min. EU hosting only.
All charge about $0.0035–0.0041 per participant-minute, so roughly $470–590 a month now and $5,000–5,900 at Growth, before recording. Daily and Whereby include a ready-made lesson screen; the others are toolkits we'd build on. Twilio Video is alive again (Twilio cancelled its 2024 shutdown), but that makes it a riskier long-term choice. Dyte is in maintenance mode and moving to Cloudflare RealtimeKit (beta pricing, $0.002/min).
Stream lists $0.30 per 1,000 participant-minutes plus $100 of free credit each month. That's very cheap, but the page contradicts itself about how far the credit goes, so get it confirmed in writing before relying on it. We'd build the lesson screen ourselves.
Google Meet / Teams can't run inside our app. Meet is what teachers paste today; keep it as a free fallback link.
LiveKit data transfer is estimated at about 7.5 MB per participant-minute (two incoming video streams at roughly 500 kbps each). Recording is priced per recorded lesson-minute, not per participant. The per-minute API costs for Daily, Whereby, 100ms, Zoom, Agora, Vonage and Twilio come from our research notes. I checked JaaS, MynaParrot, LiveKit, Digital Samba and Stream against their live pricing pages on 28 Sep 2026.