Zoom has established itself as a market leader in modern workplace video communications, offering simple and dependable audio and video conferencing technologies.
Let’s take a closer look at Zoom and how it makes money.
How Does Zoom Work?
Visit ZoomZoom is a cloud-based SaaS tool that enables private individuals and organizations to communicate remotely. Chats, audio, video, or a combination of the three can all be used to communicate.
Users can have one-on-one meetings or participate in video conferences with up to 500 people. Meeting participants can better collaborate within meetings and communicate information by using screen sharing.
Zoom’s two primary products, Zoom Meetings and Chat as well as Zoom Rooms and Workspaces, are driving the company’s global adoption.
Zoom Meetings can be seen and held through a web browser, as well as desktop and mobile apps. The Chat feature is an add-on to the Meeting product that allows users to chat with one another, share files, and form groups.
Rooms and Workspaces, on the other hand, allow businesses to hold virtual meetings using hardware such as a computer, tablet, camera, microphone, and more. The product is designed for larger enterprises that need to convene meetings in multiple locations.
Zoom even offers its own set of gear, which it developed in partnership with other manufacturers, to make integration with the hardware easier (including the Poly X Series or DTEN ON).
Zoom’s software and hardware can be found in over 100 countries. Customers include Uber, Rakuten, TransferWise, and a slew of other well-known companies.
How Does Zoom Make Money?
What makes Zoom profitable if it can be utilized for free? Zoom makes the majority of its money by selling subscriptions to its services.
Zoom’s revenue model is based on a cloud-based “freemium” concept. The primary product or service is free in this model, but users can upgrade to a premium version with more features for a fee. The premium offerings are how Zoom makes money.
The premise behind this model is that free users would eventually convert to paying customers, allowing the product to develop traction.
Zoom has mastered this approach, having amassed a sizable user base by giving high-quality Zoom software for free while still making money on its premium offers.
1. Zoom Meetings
The company’s main product is the Zoom Cloud Meetings service. It allows users to communicate via voice and video, as well as chat, where they may share text, images, and audio files, among other things.
Basic, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscription tiers are available for this solution. Zoom is accessible as a desktop application as well as a mobile application for iOS and Android.
The pricing for each of the tiers is listed below.
Zoom Basic: This tier is completely free and ideal for personal usage. This does not include some of the more advanced functions that a company could require.
Meetings of 40 minutes or less are free in this tier. You can hold video conferences with up to 100 people and have an unlimited number of 1:1 meetings. Local recordings of meetings are possible.
Zoom Pro: This tier is ideal for small teams, and it costs $149.90 a year/license. It allows for limitless video conferencing with up to 100 people.
It supports social media streaming as well as local and cloud recording of up to 1 GB (per license). This option is ideal for small teams because it allows you to buy up to 9 licenses per account.
Zoom Business: This tier is ideal for small and medium organizations, and it can accommodate up to 300 people in Zoom cloud meetings. It costs $199.90 per year per license, with ten licenses costing $1,999.00 per year with Single Sign-On.
You can hold video conferences with up to 300 people and use cloud recording transcripts, which are audio transcripts that transcribe the audio from a meeting or webinar you recorded to the cloud. For the time being, only the English language is supported.
You can utilize your company/university email address domain to automatically add people to your account using the Managed Domains functionality. You can add your company branding to your personalized page where your users can join a meeting using the Branding feature. You can also send invitations to guests using a branded email template.
Zoom Enterprise: This tier is designed for large businesses and can accommodate up to 500 people in meetings. With the Enterprise+ Plan, it can organize video conferences with up to 1000 attendees.
This plan offers unlimited cloud storage, a dedicated customer success manager, and transcription benefits for $199.90/year/license (starting at 100 licenses for $19,990.00/year).
2. Zoom Phone
Zoom Phone is a basic and easy-to-use audio conferencing solution. It’s a cloud-based calling service for people who want to make short conversations without video. Zoom Phone transforms Zoom into a full-featured communication and collaboration tool, combining voice, conferencing, messaging, and video in one package.
3. Zoom Rooms
Zoom Rooms are perfect for businesses, but they require a separate subscription in addition to a Zoom subscription. Zoom Rooms is a software-based video conferencing system that leverages off-the-shelf camera, speaker, and display hardware, making it the most versatile video solution for any of your rooms.
This solution costs $499.00 per year per room, and you can buy up to 49 licenses online. Customers can utilize the Zoom conference room connection to start meetings straight from current conference room systems if they already have conference rooms set up with existing vendors. They can buy gear from Zoom’s hardware partners if they don’t have it.
4. Zoom Webinar
Zoom Webinar is a video conferencing platform that lets you broadcast a Zoom conference to up to 10,000 viewers, depending on the amount of your webinar license. Webinars can be one-time events, part of a series, or the same session repeated numerous times. The cost of a Zoom webinar ranges from $400.00 per year/license for 100 attendees to $64,900.00 per year/license for 10,000 attendees. This solution is suitable for town hall meetings, presentations, and training.
Items that easily interact with other products are appreciated in this age of collaboration. Zoom integrates with Atlassian, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, Slack, and a number of other productivity, collaboration, data management, and security software providers.
Zoom also has options tailored to the education, healthcare, and government sectors.
What’s Next for Zoom in 2021?
Despite the company’s ongoing innovation, market leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Cisco continue to pose a significant threat. Expanding into additional productivity tools such as calendar apps and email services could provide Zoom with the push it requires.
Zoom now boasts over 350 million daily meeting participants, a significant increase over last year’s data. There’s no questioning Zoom’s ability to gain new traction. Zoom’s new features, as well as the company’s ongoing efforts to deliver fresh results for corporate users, keep the company’s name on everyone’s lips.
Zoom’s collaboration with Amazon was extended at the end of November, allowing it to continue to use Amazon’s world-class infrastructure.
For the time being, there isn’t enough information about the proposed email and calendar apps to predict whether they’ll go forward or not. If Zoom takes this path, we could be looking at a new tech behemoth.