Scheduling and meetings decision
Livestorm
A small technical team can reproduce a usable webinar workflow (registration, browser-based streaming, chat, recording, replay) for modest audiences, but Livestorm's enterprise-grade compliance, large-attendee scale, polished AI features and extensive integrations are nontrivial to match and justify keeping the paid service for those needs.
Visit website↗$2.5/mo
$30/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$150/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 62 seats.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Create an event registration page, accept registrants, run a browser-based live webinar (audio/video + screen sharing), collect chat/Q&A and polls, record the session and publish replay with basic attendance analytics.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise-grade SLA, dedicated Customer Success and VIP support
- Large-scale attendee capacity and proven global delivery at thousands of attendees
- ISO 27001 certification, formal GDPR compliance controls and legal assurances
- Built-in thousands of native integrations and advanced custom analytics
- Polished AI features (AI Studio, content repurposing, live translations) and turnkey add-ons
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
ISO 27001 certified
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 62 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted webinar platform using Node.js + Postgres + React, deploying on a single cloud region. In scope: (1) event registration pages with custom fields and attendee storage in Postgres; (2) browser-based live streaming using an open-source SFU (deploy Jitsi or Janus) with server-side recording saved to S3; (3) in-room chat/Q&A and polls (WebSocket), moderator controls (mute, remove), and role-based session access; (4) email reminder/follow-up workflows using SendGrid with templates; (5) replay hosting with basic attendance analytics and CSV export. Out of scope: global multi-region scaling for thousands of attendees, ISO 27001 certification, advanced AI transcription/repurposing, deep CRM native integrations, and SLA/support. Include error handling, retry logic for recording uploads and emails, logging, basic E2E tests for registration-to-replay flow, and deployment scripts (Terraform or CloudFormation) plus a runbook for incident recovery.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score52
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLivestorm product page
- official pricingLivestorm pricing
- official docsLivestorm AI features
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
