(Yicai Global) March 14 -- The video conference and online meeting app developed by Tencent Cloud, the cloud services arm of Chinese internet behemoth Tencent Holdings, will start charging for some of its services that are currently free of charge, it said.

Users of Tencent Meeting who hold meetings for longer than one hour or with more than 100 participants will need to become paying members from April 4, the Shenzhen-based company said today. Before, only those who hosted sessions with over 300 people had to pay.

A monthly subscription costs CNY30 (USD4.40) per 25 participants, and users can host meetings up to a maximum of 500 people.

Online conferencing became very popular during the Covid-19 pandemic and operators quickly gathered a huge number of customers. But how to retain these users, how to maintain their charging models as well as how to expand their footprint are common difficulties faced by both Internet giants and startups, a market analyst said.

Many of these service providers, including Tencent Meeting, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding’s Ding Talk and TikTok operator ByteDance’s Feishu, have put more emphasis on business revenue rather than market size in the post-pandemic era, the person said.

Last March, Ding Talk started to charge smaller companies an annual fee of CNY9,800 (USD1,425) for its premium services, bigger firms a minimum of CNY100,000 (USD14,542) and industry giants CNY1 million.

Editors: Zhang Yushuo, Kim Taylor