Clarification on Zoom API Usage and Associated Costs for SaaS Educational Platform

API and Webhooks
1

Hello Zoom Community,

I’m seeking clarity on the Zoom API’s usage limits and associated costs for our SaaS educational platform.

Our Use Case:

  • Platform Functionality: We enable teachers to schedule Zoom meetings through our platform’s user interface, which internally makes direct calls to the Zoom API (specifically using the POST /users/{userId}/meetings endpoint). Students join these meetings via standard Zoom links; we do not utilize any SDKs.

  • Meeting Hosting: All meetings are scheduled and hosted by a single Zoom user account we’ve created specifically for this purpose. This account holds a Zoom Workplace Pro license at $15.99/month.

  • Participant Capacity: Each meeting is intended to accommodate up to 150 students. We understand that to support more than 100 participants, we need to purchase the Large Meeting add-on for an additional $50/month.

  • Cloud Recording: We plan to record sessions and are considering the 1TB Cloud Recording add-on at $100/month to accommodate storage needs.

Questions:

  1. API Rate Limits: Are there any rate limits we should be aware of when creating meetings via the API? Specifically, is there a maximum number of meetings that can be created per day using a single host account?

  2. Concurrent Meetings: Can the single host account schedule and host multiple meetings simultaneously? If not, would we need to create additional licensed user accounts to handle concurrent sessions?

  3. Additional Costs: Beyond the Pro license, Large Meeting add-on, and Cloud Recording storage, are there any other costs or limitations we should anticipate when scaling our platform to support numerous teachers and students?

We aim to ensure compliance with Zoom’s terms and provide a seamless experience for our users. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Best regards,

Eliran,
CEO at Imagine

1 Like
2

For rate limiting, there is a limit of 100 meeting create or update operations per host user per UTC day. In our system, we record what we want the schedule to be and then (on demand or periodically) compare that to Zoom’s schedule and send changes to bring them into alignment. This means we don’t have to specifically account for rate limiting, as we’ll retry in a later attempt.

For meeting hosting, depending on your plan, each licensed user can host 1 or 2 concurrent meetings. You can pass hosting privileges to another licensed user so the original host can leave; I’ve heard this is typically done by telling the host key to the new host and having them claim host privileges.

Those are the two areas where I feel I can reasonably comment.