The 40-minute cap on free group video calls is not arbitrary: it reflects what a minute of video actually costs a provider. Here is where the cost comes from, what each free tier really gives you, and how to avoid the limit without paying.
If you have ever been cut off mid-sentence and had everyone rejoin a second call, you have met the forty-minute limit. It is oddly consistent across the industry, and that consistency is not coincidence or copying — it comes from the economics of carrying video.
We run a free tier with the same cap, so this is partly an explanation of our own product. But the mechanics are the same whoever you use, and knowing them tells you which free tier actually suits your team.
Most software features cost a provider almost nothing per use. Storing a document is fractions of a penny a month. Sending a chat message is negligible. Those costs are dominated by engineering time, not usage.
Real-time video is different. Every participant-minute consumes bandwidth through media servers that route streams between participants, transcode for different devices and network conditions, and relay traffic for people behind restrictive firewalls. That capacity is billed per participant-minute, whether the participant is talking or silently muted with the camera off.
So a five-person hour-long call is not “one call” — it is three hundred participant-minutes. A single team leaving a standing meeting room open all day can cost a provider more than a thousand users who only chat and edit documents.
The design consequence: any provider offering unlimited free group video is either subsidising it from paid customers, capping it somewhere less visible (participant count, resolution, features), or planning to change the terms later. The forty-minute cap is the honest version of that constraint — you can see it, so you can plan around it.
Forty minutes is long enough for the overwhelming majority of real meetings — most standups, one-to-ones and check-ins finish inside thirty — while being short enough to prevent the expensive failure mode, which is not long meetings but forgotten ones: the call nobody hung up, quietly billing participant-minutes into the evening.
It also functions as an honest upgrade signal. Teams that routinely need ninety-minute calls are running workshops and client sessions — the kind of usage that genuinely has commercial value and should sit on a paid tier.
The headline number is rarely the constraint that bites. Check these three things instead:
Does the cap apply to one-to-one calls? This is the most useful difference between free tiers and the least advertised. Many providers, ours included, do not time-limit two-person calls — because a 1:1 is a fraction of the cost of a group call. If most of your calls are pairs, a group-call cap may never affect you at all.
How many participants before it degrades? A generous time limit with a five-person ceiling is worse for an all-hands than a tight limit with a twenty-person ceiling. Match the limit to the shape of your meetings.
Is screen sharing included? A video call without screen sharing is not a working meeting for most teams. Some free tiers restrict it.
Use 1:1 calls where the cap does not apply. If your provider exempts two-person calls — check, because most do — then pair conversations, reviews and check-ins have no ceiling at all. This alone removes the problem for many small teams.
Treat the timer as the agenda. Teams who schedule forty minutes and publish an agenda usually finish early. The limit is an unwelcome interruption in an unstructured meeting and invisible in a structured one.
Take the tail async. Most meetings that overrun do so during the part that is really a written update. Move that into a document or a chat thread where people can absorb it properly.
Break long sessions deliberately. For genuine workshops, schedule two forty-minute blocks with a five-minute break. Attention benefits more than it suffers.
Keep the meeting attached to its notes. Rejoining is only painful when context lives elsewhere. If the document, chat and call sit in the same workspace, a reconnect costs seconds rather than derailing the session.
So you can compare like for like: our free plan gives unlimited 1:1 video calls with no time limit, group calls of up to five people for forty minutes, and screen sharing on both. It also includes documents, spreadsheets, presentations, team chat, 2 GB of storage and 100 AI messages a month — free forever for individuals, not a trial.
Paid plans remove the group-call time limit and raise participant counts: Team at £7 per seat per month, Business at £14. Full detail is on the pricing page, and the FAQ answers the questions we get asked most.
What we would not claim: if you run large webinars or all-day workshops, a specialist conferencing product will serve you better, and we said as much in our piece on consolidating a small-team stack. The free tier here is built for the meetings small teams actually hold — short, frequent, and attached to the work being discussed.
Unlimited 1:1 calls, free forever
With documents, chat and screen sharing in the same workspace — so a reconnect never costs you the thread.
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