Google Meet is an excellent alternative – there’s a free version and the 1:1 meeting cap is 24 hours (and, for meetings of more than three people, it’s 1 hour – still longer than Zoom’s). For staff who spend most of their days in 1:1 meetings and have been surviving on Zoom’s free offering, this could be a gamechanger – and not in a good way. Is it Time to Switch to a Different Video Conferencing App? The news comes just days after Zoom was forced to pay $85 millionto customers as part of a class-action lawsuit. The new meeting time cap is seemingly designed to nudge more free users into purchasing paid Zoom subscriptions and increase the vendor's profit margins. Can you postpone deadline?” another user on the social media platform asked, echoing the views of many free Zoom users who will feel like this announcement is quite sudden. “It seems there's a lot of confusion and a very short timetable for users to decide what is best. When trying to verify whether the email from Zoom was indeed real, one Twitter user pointed out that individuals in Facebook counselling groups were discussing the change – which illustrates the impact this change could have on freelancers and the self-employed. There will be many users for whom Zoom has become a regular fixture of life in the past two years, making use of the free tier. Who Will be Affected by the Change?Īny free Zoom users who regularly have one on one meetings that last over 40 minutes will be affected. The video conferencing vendor did confirm that the email was legitimate via social media, however, but only after being quizzed by confused customers.

This led to some confusion among users who were unsure if the emails were in fact genuine. Zoom announced the change by sending an email to all its customers, rather than announcing the new limits via social media or on their site.

Free zoom meeting limitations