Web Conferencing: What's 'Free' Really Worth?

Once upon a time, online meetings were a bold new idea, and the easiest way to explain their appeal was to say that it would help business people avoid pricey, time-consuming travel. Why shlep across the country and check into a hotel when you could stay at your desk and run a conference -- complete with presentation slides, demos, and discussion -- across the Internet?

A decade and a half later, services such as WebEx and GoToMeeting have eliminated some unnecessary trips, but they've hardly rendered business travel obsolete. People, it turns out, still like seeing and hearing other people in person, even when making that happen is neither cheap nor easy. (I was reminded of this fact recently when a WebEx executive wanted to brief me on the service's newest features -- and requested an in-person meeting to do so.)

Web conferencing doesn't need to replace anything else to be an essential business tool, though. It's just plain useful, especially in an era in which so many of us work in teams that can be dispersed around the city, the country, or the world. And apps for devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones let people participate in online meetings even when they're nowhere near a computer.

Among the contenders that debuted in the 1990s, WebEx (now part of Cisco) was the biggest hit. For years, it was also priced out of the range of many small companies, at $100 per user per month. Then GoToMeeting (owned by Citrix) came along in 2004 and shook up things with flat-rate pricing, giving anyone the opportunity to conduct unlimited conferences for one low fee. Today, both services cost $49 per host per month, or $39 on an annual plan; attendees don't have to pay.

Free Web Conferencing Options

Those prices are more than reasonable if you're already sold on online meetings as a vital, ongoing part of how your business gets important stuff done. But maybe you're a sporadic user, or not yet convinced of their value, or just plain thrifty. In that case, you might be intrigued by the idea of a free conferencing service -- and you've still got a bunch of options, including Join.me, Slideshare's Zipcast, and the meeting service that's part of Adobe's Acrobat.com. All of them have paid plans with additional features, but they also offer free accounts with no trial-period limitations.

It's true that none of these freebies match all the features of WebEx, GoToMeeting, and other full-service online meeting systems. The Acrobat.com service, for instance, only lets two parties join a conference at a time at no cost. All Join.me lets you do is share the contents of your computer's desktop; that's great for doing presentations and demos, but it doesn't let everyone see each other via Webcam. Zipcasts have presentation and Webcam features but no desktop sharing, and free ones can't be password-protected or otherwise completely hidden, so they're a bad idea for anything that's truly confidential.

"Free" as in "Freedom"

Still, these gotchas aren't crippling, and the fact that you can use the services for free is only part of their appeal. For me, the more exciting benefit is they turn Web conferencing from a great big complicated deal into something you can do anytime and anywhere, without giving it much thought at all. Instead of being an occasional cost-cutting substitute for a major trip, it can become utterly unremarkable and impromptu.

Join.me in particular aims to eliminate every iota of hassle from the process: nobody involved is even required to sign up for an account, including the presenter. Each time you begin a conference, the service gives you a special Web address which you can send to your guests by email or other means to let them in; they can participate with any browser, or on an iPhone, an iPad, or an Android handset.

None of the providers of free services are doing it purely for the betterment of mankind, of course. The idea is that some people who try them at no charge will upgrade to paid offerings with features such as support for more conference members, extra security options, and fancier options for dial-in phone lines. Acrobat.com's for-pay version starts at $14.99 a month, Join.me is $29, and Zipcast starts at $19. (In Zipcast's case, the free version also has some moderately pesky ads.)

Here in the tech-obsessed Bay Area, services such as these are a pervasive part of the business culture. And as much as I like getting out of my home office and meeting people in person, I'll admit this: If someone down in Sunnyvale or Santa Clara proposes that we do a Web conference, I immediately realize that doing so can eliminate an hour of driving in each direction. That's two hours saved, or a quarter of a workday.

There aren't many pieces of technology of any sort, at any price, that can buy you back that kind of time -- and the fact that online meeting services can do it for free makes them all the more irresistible.