Founder & Platform Engineer, RoundMeet
Builds and operates the RoundMeet stack end to end — Jitsi/WebRTC media, the Django API, and the React meeting client.
Astik builds and runs RoundMeet: the WebRTC media tier, the Django control plane that mints room tokens, and the React client people actually meet in. He writes here about how the platform works, from the operator's side of it.
Astik Gabani is the founder of RoundMeet and the engineer who operates it. That is an unusual combination for a video-conferencing company and it shapes what gets written here: the posts describe how the product behaves because the person writing them can read the code and the logs, not because a briefing document said so.
RoundMeet runs on a self-hosted, open-source media stack — Prosody, Jicofo and Jitsi Videobridge for the real-time media, a Django REST control plane for accounts, scheduling, recording and billing, and a custom React client built directly on lib-jitsi-meet rather than an embedded iframe. Media flows browser to bridge over UDP; the API never touches it.
He is based in India and most of what he writes is grounded in what Indian teams and classrooms actually run into: variable last-mile bandwidth, meetings on phones as often as laptops, and pricing that has to make sense in rupees.
Free video conferencing plans all advertise the same thing and limit different things. Here is exactly what RoundMeet's free tier gives you — the 40-minute cap, the five-participant ceiling, and what happens at the moment the limit is reached.
In a call of thirty people, \"any questions?\" gets you silence. Polls and Q&A exist because typing is easier than unmuting. Here is how both work in RoundMeet, who controls them, and when each one earns its place.
A meeting link is a URL, and a URL travels. RoundMeet gives you three separate controls — the access token in the invite, a password lock on the room, and a lobby that makes you approve each person by name. Here is what each one actually stops.
A booking page is a link that shows people your genuinely free slots and lets them pick one. The meeting gets created, both sides get an invite with a calendar file, and nobody sends \"does Tuesday work?\" three times.
Freezing video, robot audio and a call that drops every few minutes are usually one problem wearing three costumes: not enough bandwidth for the number of video streams you are receiving. Here is what to change, in the order that helps most.
Recording in RoundMeet happens on the server, not in your browser. Here is who can start one, what everyone else in the call sees when you do, where the MP4 ends up afterwards, and what the transcript and AI summary are actually good for.