Build your own video platform?
First, count the real cost.

Building in-house means your own engineers develop a video conferencing platform rather than adopting an existing product. In practice this means writing a signalling server, standing up a media server such as an SFU (selective forwarding unit) to route streams, building the browser client, and then adding everything a real class needs — recording, transcription, breakout rooms, host moderation, scheduling, and attendance. It can be built on raw WebRTC primitives or assembled on top of a media-server library like mediasoup or a paid SDK. LiveLoop is the alternative: a finished, managed browser-based platform you adopt instead of building, where Databus has already done that engineering and continues to maintain it.

Published 2026 industry estimates put a fully custom WebRTC build at roughly US$500,000 to US$2,000,000 over 12 to 24 months with a full engineering team, while an SDK-based build using a paid real-time API typically runs US$50,000 to US$300,000 in development. Those are development costs alone, before ongoing salaries, cloud infrastructure, and maintenance. By contrast, LiveLoop is priced per host per month, starting at ₹499, with the engineering, infrastructure, and maintenance already included. The right way to read these numbers is not the headline figure but the comparison to what your institution would otherwise spend in engineering time and opportunity cost.

A production-grade custom build is commonly estimated at 12 to 24 months with a dedicated team, and that is to reach feature parity with what students and teachers already expect — not to add anything novel. An SDK-assisted build is faster but still measured in months, not weeks. LiveLoop can be running against your real timetable in days, because the platform already exists. For an institution facing an academic term that starts next month, the timeline difference is often more decisive than the cost difference.

WebRTC is a moving target. Browser APIs change, codecs evolve, and security vulnerabilities emerge, so a custom platform needs dedicated engineers indefinitely or it degrades into a liability within months. Cross-browser behaviour is a constant cost — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge each handle WebRTC differently, and Safari on iOS is especially troublesome, so institutions budget significant money every year just for compatibility maintenance. There are also recurring security audits, scaling work for peak loads, and the simple fact that when something breaks during a live class, your team owns the fix. With LiveLoop, that entire ongoing burden sits with Databus.

Almost never for a typical school, college, or coaching centre, because the cost that dominates is not the initial build but the permanent engineering team required to keep it alive. For a very large institution that already employs a strong engineering group, has a hard requirement no product can meet, and will amortise the platform across tens of thousands of users for years, an in-house build can pay off — Allen Career Institute publicly documented building its own WebRTC stack on mediasoup for exactly these reasons. For everyone else, the total cost of building plus maintaining usually far exceeds a per-host subscription, and the money spent on engineers is money not spent on teaching.

Building in-house makes sense when you have a substantial in-house engineering team you intend to keep, a requirement so specific that no existing product can meet it, the scale to amortise the cost across very large or long-running usage, and a strategic reason to own the platform as core intellectual property. Large universities with computer-science departments and big edtech companies whose product is the platform itself are the clearest fits. If video conferencing is something your institution needs to use rather than something it needs to own and sell, buying a managed platform is almost always the better allocation of money and attention.

Everything a class needs, already built and tested: one-click browser join with no app download, recording with absentee sharing, searchable transcripts, live captions in 30+ Indian languages, breakout rooms, host moderation, adaptive bitrate tuned for low-bandwidth Indian networks, and native attendance and timetable integration with SchoolDeck, CampusAlly, and TutorDesk. A new in-house build starts at a blank repository and reaches these one at a time over many months. The value of buying is not just avoiding the build — it is starting at feature parity with the platforms your teachers and parents already expect.

Yes, and many institutions do exactly that. Because LiveLoop is browser-based and integrates with your existing systems, adopting it does not lock you into a path — you run reliable classes now, while a future engineering investment, if it ever becomes justified, can be made deliberately rather than under deadline pressure. Starting with a managed platform is the low-risk default: you get teaching running immediately and keep the option to build later open, instead of betting an academic term on a 12-to-24-month engineering project that has not shipped yet. You can book a free demo to see the finished platform before you ever write a line of code.