I’m not talking about corporate or school memberships, but from the general public.
In: Economics
If enough people use Zoom, the Zoom company will be bought by a large multinational technology company like Facebook or Google. The people who invested in Zoom and keep it going now will get paid in cash or stock by this larger company.
Few, if any of these new tech companies, are actually able to support themselves without having large amounts of money pushed in by investors.
In a year or two, the large company will forget why it bought Zoom or what made Zoom worth using and they will slowly let it degrade until it becomes unusable (see Skype, etc).
Meanwhile the people who invested in Zoom now will have invested in something else, like Teleconferencing for pets. They will probably call it something cute and short like “Barkk”. Another large technology company will get FOMO and buy that off the investors.
This is the circle. The circle of Life.
It’s a paid service with a limited free version. Only the host of the room pays though.
https://zoom.us/pricing
Their free plans are limited to 40 min. They bank on people becoming accustomed to their service and finding they need it for their more advanced features.
A business pays so much per month for their zoom accounts, but don’t use them that often. Of course, they are being utilized much more right now due to everybody in quarantine, but before and after this, customers aren’t using them that often.
They don’t make money from the general public — they had a trial version that the public took advantage of, but its intention was to lure in eventually paying business customers.
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