What a free video meeting plan actually includes

Every video platform has a free tier, they all sound roughly the same in the marketing, and the differences only surface at the worst possible moment — usually about 39 minutes into something that mattered. This post is the boring, specific version for RoundMeet: what the free plan gives you, what it does not, and what actually happens when you hit a limit.

The limits, precisely#

Three of those rows deserve more than a cell.

40 minutes, per meeting#

The cap is on a single meeting, not on your day or your month. When a meeting reaches it, the meeting ends — and starting a new one begins a fresh 40 minutes.

This is worth saying plainly because every free-tier user eventually discovers it and then wonders whether they are cheating. They are not. It is a limit on continuous meeting length, and rejoining is the documented behaviour, not a loophole. It is also genuinely annoying in the middle of a workshop, which is the honest reason the limit exists at all.

Practically: if you know a call will run long, tell people at the start that you will re-send the link at the 40-minute mark. A planned break is fine. An unplanned disconnection during a client's sentence is not.

5 participants, including you#

The number is everyone in the room. You plus four others.

The sixth person cannot join — they are refused at the door rather than dropped mid-meeting, which at least means the failure happens to the person arriving rather than to the meeting. For a one-to-one, a small team stand-up or a tutorial, five is genuinely enough. For anything class-shaped it is the limit that bites first, well before the 40 minutes does.

One meeting at a time#

You cannot host two meetings simultaneously on the free plan. This only matters if you are a team sharing one account, which is a thing people try, and it is the point at which it stops working.

What the free plan does *not* limit#

This is the part most comparison articles skip, and it is where the real answer to "is the free tier usable?" lives.

• Video quality. Free meetings are not degraded. Same resolution, same media path, same bridge.
• Screen sharing. Full, including sharing a specific window or tab.
• Chat and file sharing in the meeting.
• Polls and Q&A. Both work — see polls and Q&A.
• Security controls. The access token, the password lock and the lobby are all available. Nothing about keeping people out of your meeting is behind a paywall, which is a line worth being deliberate about.
• Number of meetings. There is no monthly quota. Forty 40-minute meetings a month is fine.
• Breakout rooms, hand raise, virtual layouts, low-bandwidth mode, Car Mode.

So the free plan is not a demo with the good parts removed. It is the whole meeting experience with a stopwatch and a small room.

What is actually behind the paywall#

Four things, and they cluster more neatly than the table suggests:

Recording, transcripts and AI summaries. These are the expensive ones to run — a recorder process joins your meeting, then a transcription model runs over the audio, then the file is stored for a month or a year. That is real compute and real disk per meeting, which is why they start at Pro rather than being metered on free. How recording works covers what you get.

Room size and meeting length. The 40-minute and five-person caps.

The whiteboard.

Booking pages. Zero on free, three on Pro, fifty on Business. If the reason you are here is letting people book time with you, that needs Pro.

Is the free plan enough for you?#

It comes down to two questions, in this order.

How many people? Six or more in a room, regularly, and no arrangement of the other settings helps. This is the hard wall.

Do you need the meeting to still exist afterwards? If your meetings need a recording, a transcript or a summary — training sessions, interviews, anything with minutes — free will not do it, and no amount of rejoining works around that.

If neither applies, free is a real answer rather than a trial. One-to-ones, pair work, small stand-ups and tutorials all fit comfortably inside it.

Prices#

Deliberately not in this post. Prices change, blog posts do not, and a stale number is worse than no number: the pricing page has the current figures in rupees, including what GST does to them.

What is stable enough to say here is the shape. Pricing is per user per month, billed to the account that hosts the meeting — the people who *join* your meetings are never charged and never need an account, so a five-person team pays for five people, not for everyone they ever meet with.

The short version#

Free is 40 minutes, 5 people, one meeting at a time, and no recording — with everything else, including all the security controls, fully working. If your meetings are small and you do not need them to exist afterwards, that is a real plan. If you need six people or a recording, it is not, and no setting changes that.