Rutba

Blog · Workspace

We built the whole meeting and you still cannot buy it

Rooms, lobby, breakouts, polls, whiteboard, attendance reports: built and tested. The media server all of it talks to is not deployed, so the product is listed as coming soon. Also: why we refuse end-to-end encryption.

· 4 min read · updated 26 September 2026

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Two columns: what is built (rooms, lobby, breakouts, polls, whiteboard, attendance) against what is missing: the media server, and therefore anything to buy.
A long left column and a short right one, and the short one wins.

"Coming soon" usually means "not written". Here it means "waiting on one deployment", and since those are very different things to be told, this post says which.

What is built and tested

  • Rooms and screen sharing, in the browser, with no install.
  • Host mute and remove, with a guarantee that a room is never left with nobody in charge.
  • A lobby you knock at and are admitted from; meeting lock and passcode.
  • Guest join without a Rutba account: passcode-only, off until a host turns it on, and rate-limited so a six-digit code cannot be swept.
  • Raised hands, reactions, polls, breakout rooms, a shared whiteboard, and a shared document everyone edits at once.
  • Background blur, noise suppression, audio-only fallback when the line struggles, and a pre-join camera and microphone check.
  • Active-speaker and grid layouts with per-viewer pinning, in-meeting chat, and an attendance report exportable as CSV.

What is not in place is the media server all of that talks to. Video is not a feature you can half-deploy: without the server there is no product, however much of the product exists.

A feature list is not a product. The missing piece decides, not the long list.

Recording, deliberately narrow

When this was written, recording here was local capture only, attachable to the meeting only if it was declared to every participant first, and the server refuses an undeclared one. That is narrower than what an incumbent means by the word, which is server-side recording of everything, always available to the host.

The narrow version is the one that survives a conversation with a works council, a data protection officer, or a customer in a jurisdiction with two-party consent. The broad version is the one that produces a compliance incident eighteen months later.

And we refuse end-to-end encryption, on purpose

This is the decision most likely to be read as a shortcoming, so it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving it as an absence on a comparison table.

The rest of what is absent

Transcripts and live captions, AI summaries, background replacement, and dial-in from an ordinary phone are all not built. Several of those are on most buyers’ lists, and none of them is a week of work. Server-side recording was on this list too, until it was built (see the update above).

What it is actually for

The reason to build this at all rather than buy one: a meeting booked from a customer record and logged back to it, with notes attached to the deal or ticket where the next person will look. A meeting tool records that a call happened; this records what it was about.

PlanPriceWhat it is for
Starter$3 per user / monthCalendar and calls for the team.
Business$6 per user / monthCustomer-facing meetings, logged.
EnterpriseCustom, annualLarge meetings and webinars.

Those prices are published for a product you cannot buy today, which is unusual and intentional: if the number is going to matter to your decision, you should be able to see it while you are deciding whether to wait.

Rutba Meet

The full built-and-tested list, the absences, and the calendar half that comes with it.

See the product

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