@AMP Just to clarify: everyone gets completely unlimited time and sessions for the first 4 weeks. After that sessions are limited to 50 minutes. You can restart as many sessions as you like on the free plan, but we limit it to 1 per hour, so you have to wait a little bit in between.
We do fully support public sessions where anyone can join without an invite link, and they are prominently advertised on our home page. We just don’t have many people doing this – seems most people already have a group and prefer to keep it private.
It used to be that you would only see this option when creating a studio if you said that you were looking for other musicians to play with. I recently changed the forms for creating new studios so that the flag to enable public studio sessions is now prominently displayed on its own to everyone. It could be that was keeping people from using it – we’ll see if this helps at all.
As @Synthia said, those who are technically inclined can also manage your own JackTrip studio server (similar to Jamulus), and that is free with no limits on the number or length or sessions. JackTrip is open source, after all. I think you could even do this (for smaller groups) using a Raspberry Pi 5 with fairly little effort – been meaning to write up a guide on this for some time.. But not sure how many people would really be interested in that – the cost of our service is so low now that it’s hardly worth the effort.
It would be awesome if all of this was completely free, but running this service does have expenses, and we are FAR away from even breaking even, let alone being profitable. All of this has largely been a donation of blood, sweat, tears and money to make it a reality.