Can join more than 2000 audience?

[Sayteen]

Hi, 

My question is about if I have a free account and I want to have a meeting with around 2000 audience and 2 persons who will talk, is it possible to do all these by free account? 

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @Sayteen --

Unfortunately the answer is "no, on many levels".  I'll explain a little, and also tell you what you do need to accomplish what it sounds like you want to do.

First, looking at the Zoom Pricing Guide's "Full Plan Comparison" table, a Basic user is limited to 100 attendees.  Free plans are not eligible for upgrading the number of attendees, so as long as you're a Basic user, that's it, sorry.

Next, if you're only going to have 2 people speaking, it sounds like what you really want is a Webinar.  This puts all of your regular attendees "in the audience" with no microphone and no camera feed to the group... they can hear and see the Panelists and Hosts, who are the only people who can be seen and heard.

Lastly, even if you have a licensed account for Meetings and want to upgrade from the included 100 (or 300 for Business and Enterprise licenses) attendees, Meetings can only be upgraded to a max of 1000 attendees.  Having a full meeting with everyone (potentially) on audio and with a camera feed is extremely bandwidth intensive for a large gathering, hence the limit for Meetings... and how Webinars are possible with the limited exchange of audio and video.

What do you need to get if you want to pursue this?  You'll want 3 things:

1. To do anything beyond the Basic account, you need to upgrade your user license from Basic (free) to Pro.
2. To host a Webinar, you need to add a license for Webinars to your user account... but before you do this:
3. To allow your Webinar to have 2000 attendees, you need to make sure your Webinar license is at the 3,000 attendee level (the next level down from that is 1,000 attendees).

The good news is that you don't have to pay for an annual license for any of this.  If you're just going to do this once -- or maybe once every few months -- then you can buy a 1-month non-recurring license for both a Pro License and a Webinar 3000 License.  Based on pricing available at https://zoom.us/pricing a 1-month Pro license is $14.99/month (plus tax/VAT/etc.), and a 1-month Webinar 3000 license is $990 + tax/etc.

You might want to start smaller and get the Pro License and the lowest tier Webinar license for 500 attendees which is only $79/month.  For under $100 for one month, you could have a nice Webinar event with up to 500 attendees.  If you planned it well in advance, you could consider hosting more than one Webinar, say maybe 2 or 3 in the month of your license subscription... all at no additional charge, since the Webinar license covers "all the Webinars you want" for the duration of the license.

Note that you can use Zoom's registration feature for your event, but you can't use the regular Webinar registration feature to sell tickets to your event.  You could use Eventbrite to sell tickets; Eventbrite will feed it's registration data over to the Zoom Webinar Registration data.

If any of this sounds like what you're interested in, let me know and we can discuss some details.  Sometimes navigating the Zoom purchasing matrix can be a little confusing the first couple of times.