How Much Does It Cost to Self-Host Jitsi Meet on AWS?

Jitsi Meet itself costs nothing. It's Apache 2.0, no license fee, no per-seat charge, ever. The AWS bill underneath it is a different story.

For a small team running 50 concurrent users around the clock, budget somewhere between $60 and $100 a month in raw infrastructure. Turn on recording, or scale to 500 concurrent users, and that number climbs past $550. Here's where every dollar of Jitsi Meet pricing actually goes, using AWS EC2 on-demand pricing and Meetrix's own Jitsi hosting listings on AWS Marketplace, both checked in July 2026.

Two Bills, Not One

If you're using a pre-built AMI like Meetrix's Jitsi Meet listings, you're paying two separate things, and it's worth knowing which is which before you look at a Marketplace price and assume it's the whole bill.

The first is the EC2 instance itself: standard AWS on-demand pricing, identical whether you install Jitsi by hand or launch a Marketplace AMI. The second is the vendor's software and support fee, billed hourly alongside the instance. That second number is what shows up in the Marketplace pricing table, and on its own it's small. People who only look at that figure and skip the AWS Pricing Calculator get surprised later.

Jitsi Server Requirements By Team Size

These are the Jitsi server requirements at each size, priced at standard EC2 on-demand rates for us-east-1. They apply no matter who configured the software.

Concurrent Users	Instance	vCPU / RAM	On-demand cost
Up to 50	c5.large	2 vCPU / 4GB	$0.085/hr (~$62/mo)
Up to 100	c5.xlarge	4 vCPU / 8GB	$0.17/hr (~$124/mo)
250-500	c5.2xlarge	8 vCPU / 16GB	$0.34/hr (~$248/mo)

Past 500 concurrent, you're not scaling one instance further, you're adding JVB instances behind an autoscaling group. We covered exactly where a single shard starts to strain in our 1000-user capacity testing.

What Meetrix's Jitsi Meet Pricing Adds

On top of the instance cost, Meetrix's AWS Marketplace listings charge a per-tier software fee. This is the part of Jitsi Meet pricing most cost guides skip. It's not a flat percentage, it's priced by capacity tier and instance size, and here's what it looks like as of this writing:

Tier	Recording	Software fee (hourly)	365-day contract savings
50 users	No	$0.029-$0.048/hr	Up to 41%
100 users	No	$0.048/hr flat	Up to 41%
250 users	Yes	$0.029-$0.048/hr	Up to 42%
500 users	Yes	$0.12-$0.289/hr	Up to 14%

That fee buys a working, patched deployment instead of an afternoon (realistically, several afternoons the first time) spent getting Jicofo and Prosody talking to each other correctly. Whether that trade is worth $35 to $211 a month depends entirely on what your own time costs. For a two-person startup, it's usually not close. For a team without a dedicated DevOps person, it often is.

Recording Doubles Your Instance Count

Jibri, Jitsi's recording component, doesn't run alongside the meeting server. It needs its own instance, and it needs real RAM: at least 8GB for 720p, 12GB if you're recording at 1280x1024. That rules out the smaller t3 instances people default to, and it's a second EC2 bill, not a bigger single one.

Budget another $60-125/month for that instance depending on size, plus S3 storage for the recordings themselves at $0.023/GB/month. A 90-minute 720p recording runs somewhere around 1-2GB, so storage costs stay low unless you're recording constantly and never cleaning up old files.

The Bandwidth Line Nobody Budgets For

Video conferencing is a data transfer workload before it's anything else. The JVB relays every participant's stream to every other participant, and that egress traffic bills at AWS's standard rate: the first 100GB/month is free, then $0.09/GB after that.

Rough math: conference-resolution video typically runs 500 kbps to 1.5 Mbps per stream. A 50-person call with most cameras on means the JVB is relaying dozens of simultaneous streams, and a single hour-long all-hands can push tens of gigabytes through the instance. Run a few of those a week and the data transfer line item, not the EC2 instance, is what surprises people on their first AWS bill.

Three Real Monthly Totals

Putting the instance cost and software fee together, here's what three common setups actually cost, before bandwidth and storage:

Setup	Instance	Software fee	Total/month
Small team, 50 users, no recording	~$62	~$35	~$97
Mid-size, 100 users, no recording	~$124	~$35	~$159
Large, 500 users, with recording (+ Jibri instance)	~$248 + ~$124	~$211	~$583

That last number looks steep next to Zoom's per-host pricing until you multiply Zoom out across 500 named users. We ran that comparison in more detail in Jitsi vs Zoom vs Google Meet. Self-hosting wins on cost at scale. It just stops being free the moment you need more than a handful of concurrent calls.

Cutting the Bill

A few things actually move the number, and a few don't.

The 365-day Marketplace contracts are real savings, 14% to 41% off the software fee depending on tier, and worth taking if you already know you're running this for a year. Right-sizing the instance matters more than people expect: don't launch a c5.2xlarge because you might hit 250 users someday. Start on the c5.xlarge, watch CPU and memory under real load, and resize when you're actually close to the ceiling, not before.

Turning off idle capacity helps less than it sounds like it should, since the Jitsi Meet server itself needs to stay up for scheduling and signaling even between calls. The JVB is where autoscaling earns its keep, not the base server.

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