Why Does Simple Webinar Software Cost €80/Month?

This is how things really got started — written in December 2025, before the product had a name, before there was a website. I am posting it here, almost unchanged, because it is the honest origin story and the frustration that drove it has not gone away.

I didn't want to build a product.

I just wanted to run a series of simple webinars for my business partner.

Zoom meeting. Email confirmations. A few reminders. Follow-ups after.

That's it.

I already had Brevo. I use it because it's good, affordable, and integrates well with other tools. I already had Zoom. We've been running large, yet bare-bones Zoom meetings for years. People understand Zoom. It works.

This wasn't some exotic setup.

It sounded trivial. It wasn't.

What I didn't want

What I didn't want was yet another "webinar platform" or funnel monster. I also really wanted to kick out Calendly. It's expensive for what it does, and for a webinar inside a marketing funnel it's actively harmful. The moment you send people to a big calendar UI with time slots, half of them are gone.

For a webinar, people shouldn't choose. They should register.

And the marketing emails, all of them, should be in ONE place. Not some in Calendly, some in Zoom, some in Zapier, just the rest in Brevo. That is a nightmare — and in Europe actually illegal — how do you opt people out from Zapier?

So in my head, the minimum stack was obvious: Brevo for all email logic, Zoom Meetings for the live session. Meetings are sufficient for this format, much cheaper than the broadcast tier, and we actually like that we can see participants.

I was even still on the Brevo free plan at the time. There was nothing about this that shouldn't work.

What actually happened when I tried to wire it together

It turned into a waste of time.

Calendly — which, once desperate enough, I would have been willing to add back — creates new Zoom meetings when you don't want it to. Zapier fires, but loses context. And let me not get started on the generic error Zapier would keep showing for the Calendly connection. Brevo can react to events — but then can't remember which webinar someone registered for. Event data exists — but you can't use it later. Zoom requires a last name. Calendly wants both names together or separate — but not all of them. Lists explode. Automations multiply. Timezone handling is… optimistic at best.

At some point I realized something uncomfortable:

Yes, I can make this work. But only if I accept complexity, fragility, and extra cost.

Often all three.

And I am honestly sick of it: paying 15 € here, 19 € there, forever — for the tiniest tools — just so one specific thing works. The moment you need one additional feature, the price multiplies. And in the end there is still one thing that this tool can't do, so you are supposed to connect yet another one.

And worse: even the "working" setups are weaker than they should be.

No clean per-webinar logic. No sane way to handle attendance vs. no-shows. No reliable reminder chain without hacks. No single place where the truth actually lives.

The missing piece

The irony: I wasn't missing tools. I already had them.

What was missing was a thin, boring layer in between — something that understands webinars as a workflow, not as a side effect of calendars, lists, or generic automations.

After losing days just to prove to myself that this wouldn't get clean, I stopped trying to bend the tools.

I built the missing layer instead.

Not a new marketing system. Not a new webinar platform. No new UI to learn.

Just a small bridge between Brevo and Zoom that keeps all email logic in Brevo, works with Zoom Meetings (cheap, familiar, sufficient), handles timezones correctly, supports real reminder logic, works with events and lists, avoids brittle Zapier chains, and doesn't force Calendly into a funnel where it doesn't belong.

The result is almost boring.

And that is the point.

It is simpler than most pieced-together setups — and more powerful than many "all-in-one" webinar tools.

I lost days proving to myself that this wouldn't get clean. Then I spent a week building something that finally does.

If you've ever thought…

• "Why do I need three more tools just to send webinar reminders?"
• "Why does Brevo know that something happened, but not which webinar?"
• "Why does every small feature add another monthly subscription?"
• "Why do webinar tools cost €80+ when all I want is a Zoom meeting?"
• "Why are my emails suddenly scattered across five systems?"

…then you and I started in the same place.

P.S.

Below is an excerpt of the email history from trying to make the prior setup work.

Between Zoom, Zapier, Brevo & Co., there is unfortunately no clean way to test most integrations other than actually running them.

Three months after writing this, the "thin layer" had turned into something with a name, a real product, and a Zoom Marketplace listing. The frustration above is exactly the frustration ManyMeet is built to remove. Read the launch post →