Video conferencing has skyrocketed during the last few years, with Zoom sitting comfortably above its competitors. Zoom may have shot to household-name status out of necessity, but that doesn’t mean the company hasn't worked hard to get to where they are today. Zoom’s great range of subscription plans has made it easy for customers to upgrade to a paid account.
In this article, we’ll look at each Zoom subscription plan so you can understand how Zoom has catapulted to success.
All of Zoom’s subscription offerings
Zoom One
Zoom One is everything most people will need from the Zoom platform. It offers all the basic features you would expect from the platform, including video conferencing meetings, whiteboards, and a team chat.
There are five tiers to Zoom One — basic, pro, business, business plus and enterprise. This allows users to easily scale their plan to fit their business or personal needs.
Basic (free)
The basic plan is a free lifetime plan that anyone can sign up for. It offers video conferencing meetings for up to 100 participants with a time limit of 40 minutes. Basic subscribers also get three editable whiteboards with 25MB of cloud storage, team chats and channels for collaboration, and automated captioning during calls.
Pro (£119.90 per year per user)
The pro plan includes all the features in the basic plan without the 40-minute meeting limit. It also includes 5GB of cloud storage to record and store meetings for future reference.
Business (£159.90 per year per user)
The business plan increases your video conferencing capabilities by offering meetings with up to 300 participants. It also offers unlimited whiteboards, single sign-on, company branding, and managed domains.
Business Plus (£185 per year per user)
Business Plus is the perfect tier for international businesses. It improves on the business plan by offering 10GB of cloud storage for storing meetings and improvements to automatic captioning. For example, Zoom will automatically translate the conversation into subtitles for meetings with international participants.
Business Plus also incorporates Zoom Phone, which we’ll look at in more detail shortly.
Enterprise (price on request)
Zoom’s Enterprise plan offers absolutely everything the platform has to offer, with meetings for up to 1000 participants, Zoom Room + Conference rooms, Webinars 500 and unlimited cloud storage.
Zoom Phone
Zoom Phone is only available for businesses and allows them to set up VOIP phone calls that integrate with their existing telephone systems.
As with Zoom One, there are a range of plans available depending on a business’ needs. All plans offer optional add-ons, including toll-free numbers, additional phone numbers, enhanced developer support and more.
UK & Ireland metered - Pay As You Go
This pay-as-you-go option allows businesses to get started with Zoom Phone without breaking the budget. For £96 per year per user, companies get a dedicated UK & Ireland number to make and receive calls from multiple devices and apps.
With the pay-as-you-go plan, you get extension-to-extension, inbound, and outbound calling, with outbound minutes being metered.
UK & Ireland Unlimited - unlimited regional calling
This unlimited plan offers the same features as the pay-as-you-go option without metering outgoing calls. This plan has an optional add-on for those needing international capabilities, offering unlimited calling to 19 countries.
Pro Global Select
This is a plan for businesses outside the UK and Ireland and allows unlimited domestic calling in their chosen country. Users will receive a direct dial number and can upgrade their capabilities with an unlimited international calling add-on.
Zoom Events & Webinars
For businesses that regularly hold large-scale online events and webinars, Zoom has some great offerings. Both Zoom Events and Zoom Webinars can scale with your needs from up to 500 attendees right up to 10,000+! It’s important to note that businesses need to already have a paid Zoom Meetings plan to be eligible for Events or Webinars.
Zoom Webinars
Zoom can offer unlimited webinar sessions for up to 30 hours each, with customisable branding and control over a speaker’s virtual background. Businesses can export registrant and attendee lists with simple integration for CRM and marketing automation tools.
Businesses can also monetise their webinars through paid registration and record sessions to the cloud to be viewed later.
Zoom Events
Zoom Events allows businesses to host multi-session, multi-track, and multi-day events. Host events in style with customisable registration and ticketing options, customisable audience profiles, and custom calls to action. The easy-to-use, step-by-step event set-up helps businesses create memorable, effective events that drive business.
What Zoom's subscription business model gets right
For a platform that most people think is just for video chat, Zoom offers a massive range of features and plans to suit any business. They’re offering exactly what their customers need at a price that suits them without compromising their mission statement.
Since day one, Zoom’s mission statement has been “Make video communications frictionless”, and everything they currently offer enables this. This mission was formed when the Zoom company founder Eric Yuan worked at Cisco on the WebEx video platform. Yuan wasn’t happy with the WebEx experience, and Cisco wouldn’t listen to his calls to improve the platform, so Yuan took matters into his own hands.
Yuan raised funding and launched Zoom with a limited offering in 2013. By May 2013, the platform had already passed 1 million users, no doubt to the dismay of Cisco. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength (though the post-COVID period has not been kind to its stock market price).
Zoom’s success comes from its efforts to simplify video conferencing for all users. They regularly listen to customer feedback, which helps to boost word of mouth and organic marketing.
The company also got a few unique wins in the last few years, with the pandemic driving an enormous number of new users to the platform.
Their generous free plan let everyone stay in touch during lockdown and gave many a chance to test the platform’s features. Marketing was easy, because every conversation acted as further marketing for the company. For every user that signs up, there are guaranteed to be others that sign up to communicate with them.
Learn more about the big names in subscription commerce
Zoom is just one of the big names dominating the subscription commerce space. Be sure to keep an eye on the Limio blog for more coverage and insight into the other big players in subscriptions.
If you’re looking to launch your own subscription business, Limio can help! We’re a start-up in London helping companies sell their subscription products. Get in touch with us to see how we can help you get started.
Deep dive: An in-depth look at Zoom's subscriptions