How to Cut 90% Costs on Zoom Meetings: A Comprehensive Case Study
- July 25, 2024
- 3 Min Read
If you want to save money, it doesn’t always have to come from big changes. Sometimes, planning and research can help you cut down costs in daily operations.
Here is a case study on how TechUp Labs reduced the cost of using Zoom by more than 90% for their partner product with small tweaks and saved 10k+ every month.
Understanding the background
TechUp Labs is a tech partner for a digital education SaaS platform with a user base of 500+ active educators who regularly host video classes on Zoom Meetings.
Here is the initial setup.
- 1 Zoom user account per educator, resulting in a total of 500 zoom user accounts.
- The cost was $21.99/user/month (as of April 2024)
- In total, we paid $10995 per month ($21.99 x 500 zoom user accounts)
- Associate each Zoom user account to a specific educator in our database that looks like this:
- users table:
- zoom_users table:
- users table:
Iteration 1: Changing license type
To find ways to optimize our Zoom usage, we came across the Zoom support article.
As per the article:
Hosting concurrent, or simultaneous, meetings means that the same user is hosting more than one meeting at the same time. This capability depends on your account and license type.
Each Basic user and Licensed user on a Pro account can host only 1 meeting at a time.
But, licensed users on Business, Education, and Enterprise accounts can host up to 2 meetings at the same time. This cut the cost in half.
New Setup:
- 1 Zoom user account per 2 educators
- Total: 250 Zoom user accounts
- Cost: $5,497.50 per month ($21.99 x 250)
- Associate each Zoom user account to 2 educators in our database that looks like:
- users table:
- zoom_users table:
- users table:
Iteration 2: Adding Concurrent Meetings Plus license add-on
The change in license made us wonder if other licenses allow simultaneous meetings on one account. Turns out, yes.
Zoom provides two types of license add-ons i.e. "Concurrent Meetings Basic" and "Concurrent Meetings Plus.” They allow users to schedule up to 4 and 20 concurrent meetings respectively. Reference:
We chose the "Concurrent Meetings Plus" license add-on as it made more sense to allow a single Zoom user to host as many concurrent meetings as it could.
How to buy the "Concurrent Meetings Plus" license?
Raise a support ticket by contacting Zoom's Sales or customer support team from the Zoom support website. Request access to the Concurrent Meetings Plus license add-on. You are granted access if Zoom approves your request.
Price: $45/user/month
Here is what the Iteration 2 setup looks like.
Our database structure & zoom user mapping code was already optimized & no further changes were required.
- 25 Zoom user accounts (1 for 20 educators)
The "Concurrent Meetings Plus" license add-on users can schedule up to 20 concurrent meetings.
Total users calculation: 500 / 20 = 25 - The new pay structure is as follows:
- $21.99/user/month
- $45/user/month for Concurrent Meetings Plus license add-on
- Total: $66.99/user/month ($21.99 + $45)
- We paid a total of $1674.75 per month ($66.99 x 25 Zoom user accounts)
- Associate each Zoom user account with 20 educators in our database.
With this change, the cost comes down to 15% of the original. Here, we have reached the limit of optimizing the platform. But there was still one optimization to make.
Iteration 3: Reducing the number of Zoom accounts Based on Usage
Our efforts at optimizing platform usage pushed us to think if we have optimized our operations. We realized, from here the only way to cut costs was to reduce the number of accounts. To do that, we pulled up the graph showing the number of meetings at any given hour.
Graph: The number of meetings at any given hour
The above graph states that at any given hour, the maximum number of concurrent meetings is 186.
So, we only require 10 Zoom user accounts (186 / 20 = 9.3) at any given hour for our product.
NOTE: If your business has more variability, consider adding a buffer of 20% to avoid running out of Zoom users.
Final Zoom users calculation based on number of meetings at any given hour:
- 186 / 20 = 9.3 (10 Zoom users)
- With 20% buffer: 10 + (20% of 10) = 12 Zoom users
Next, we write an optimization algorithm running as a background job every hour to automatically assign the number of Zoom user accounts to our educators based on the number of meetings at any given hour.
New Setup:
- 12 Zoom user accounts
- Cost: $803.88 per month ($66.99 x 12)
Algorithm workflow
It varies business-to-business, but here is the basic workflow to design your own algorithm.
Recap of cost savings
To sum up the impact of each change, here is the change in cost with each iteration.
- Original cost: $10995 per month
- After iteration 1: $5497.50 per month (Savings: 50%)
- After iteration 2: $1674.75 per month (Savings: 85%)
- After iteration 3: $803.88 per month (Savings: 92.68%)
In conclusion
The case study shows the impact optimizing daily operations can have. The cost you can cut down can vary for each business. But, it is possible to pay less than what you are right now.
We were able to completely change the way we use Zoom without hampering the quality of education or causing inconvenience to educators and students.
This example forces us to think, what other processes are we blindly implementing? Are we losing thousands because we did not try?
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