The short version: you can run a proper webinar for £0 to £12 a month using Zoom Meetings (not Zoom Webinars), a free Google Form, and Mailchimp’s free tier for reminders, and it will convert just as well as the £250-a-month platforms if your offer and follow-up are strong. The tool is not what’s holding your webinars back. Your list, your pitch, and your reminder emails are.
Why I stopped paying for webinar software
In 2019 I ran webinars for a client using a dedicated webinar platform that cost £3,000 a year. It had the automated countdown timers, the fake “live” chat bubbles, the whole set-up. Registrations looked great on paper: around 400 people signed up per session.
Two years ago, rebuilding my own business from scratch and watching every pound, I ran the same style of webinar using Zoom Meetings on the free plan, a Google Form for registration, and Mailchimp’s free tier to send reminders. 340 people registered. 41 percent showed up live, which is bang in line with the industry average of 35 to 45 percent that most paid platforms quote in their own case studies. Conversion on the pitch at the end was almost identical to the £3,000-a-year version.
That comparison told me something uncomfortable: the software was never doing the heavy lifting. The list, the subject line on the reminder email, and the offer at the end were doing it. I’ve written before about what webinars typically cost to run, and the honest range for a solo consultant or small business is far lower than the industry wants you to believe.
The stack that costs nothing (or close to it)
Here’s what I use now, and what it costs in 2026:
- Zoom Meetings, free plan: £0. Capped at 40 minutes for group calls, unlimited for one-to-one. Fine for a short, punchy webinar if you plan the timing.
- Zoom Pro: £11.99 a month in the UK if you need more than 40 minutes, which most webinars do. This is the only line item most people need to pay for.
- Google Forms: £0. Used for registration instead of a paid landing page builder.
- Mailchimp free tier: £0 up to 500 contacts, sends the confirmation and reminder sequence.
- YouTube (unlisted link): £0, hosts your replay instead of paying a platform £30 to £60 a month to store video.
Total monthly cost: £11.99, and only if your webinar runs past 40 minutes. Compare that with WebinarJam at roughly $499 a year, Demio starting around $42 a month, or EverWebinar which adds another few hundred dollars a year on top for the “evergreen” replay feature. None of those tools are bad. They’re just not necessary until you’re running webinars weekly and need the automation to save you actual admin hours.
Step by step: setting it up in Zoom Meetings
This is the exact sequence I follow, and it takes about 45 minutes to set up a full webinar funnel from scratch:
- Step 1: Create a Google Form with three fields: name, email, and one qualifying question (“What’s your biggest challenge with X?”). This question does double duty as a way to filter for real prospects and as material for your Q&A later.
- Step 2: Set the form to send responses to a Google Sheet, then connect that sheet to Mailchimp using Zapier’s free tier (100 tasks a month is plenty for a single webinar) so every registrant is automatically tagged and added to your list.
- Step 3: Schedule the Zoom Meeting. Turn on “Require registration” if you’re on Zoom Pro, which gives you a built-in landing page as a backup, or just use your Google Form link if you’re on the free plan and want to skip Zoom’s registration entirely.
- Step 4: Build a three-email reminder sequence in Mailchimp: one sent immediately on registration, one 24 hours before, one 30 minutes before. This single sequence is responsible for most of the show-up rate. Skip it and your attendance drops by roughly half, in my experience.
- Step 5: Turn on cloud or local recording in Zoom before you start. Free plan users get 1GB of cloud storage, which is enough for one 60-minute HD recording. Anything bigger, record locally to your laptop instead.
- Step 6: Upload the replay to YouTube as unlisted straight after the session, and send it out within two hours while the reminder emails are still warm in people’s inboxes.
That’s the whole build. No developer, no designer, no monthly retainer to a webinar agency.
What breaks when you go cheap
I won’t pretend this stack has zero downsides, because it does, and pretending otherwise is how people end up disappointed and blaming the free tools instead of fixing the gap.
The first thing that breaks is the “green room” feature. Paid webinar platforms let you rehearse with co-hosts in a private space while attendees wait in a public one. Zoom Meetings does not separate these cleanly unless you’re on the actual Zoom Webinars add-on, which starts at roughly £69 a month for up to 500 attendees. If you’re running a webinar with a co-host, agree beforehand that you’ll both join five minutes early, mute yourselves, and use the chat to coordinate instead of talking, because attendees can hear you if you’re not careful.
The second thing that breaks is automation for evergreen or “on demand” replays. Tools like EverWebinar simulate a live webinar happening at a scheduled time even though it’s a recording, complete with a fake countdown and chat. Zoom Meetings can’t do this. If evergreen replays are core to your funnel, and I mean core, not a nice-to-have, this is the one case where paying for a dedicated tool makes sense. For everyone else running a handful of live sessions a month, it’s an unnecessary £780 a year.
The third thing that breaks is polling and engagement features. Zoom’s basic polling works fine on the free and Pro plans, but the fancier interactive slides and gamified quizzes that some platforms offer just aren’t there. I’ve never found this to cost me conversions. A well-placed poll question that ties directly into your pitch does more work than a flashy quiz slide ever has for me.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the bit that most posts on this topic skip, because it doesn’t sell software: the reason your webinar isn’t converting almost certainly has nothing to do with which tool hosted it. I’ve watched businesses spend £4,000 a year on a “premium” webinar platform and still get a 12 percent show-up rate and a 1 percent conversion, because the list they’re inviting is cold, the offer is vague, and the reminder emails are boring. Then I’ve watched a solo coach run the exact same webinar structure on free Zoom and a Google Form, with a warm list of 200 people who’d already downloaded a lead magnet, and convert at 8 percent.
Software vendors have every reason to let you believe the platform matters more than it does, because that belief is what sells subscriptions. The uncomfortable truth is that a webinar is a sales conversation with a slide deck attached, and the thing that decides whether it works is the same thing that decides whether any sales conversation works: is the person on the other end interested, and are you giving them a reason to act before they close the tab. This is also why your registration source matters more than your recording quality. If you’re pulling registrants through a funnel that’s already warmed them up with a lead magnet or a short email sequence, you’ll outperform a cold Facebook ad audience on a £3,000 platform every time.
Making the free stack feel professional
There’s a real risk with going cheap, which is that it looks cheap, and that undermines trust before you’ve said a word. A few things fix this without spending anything:
- Rename your Zoom meeting title from “Zoom Meeting” to your webinar’s actual title, so it shows up in the waiting room and calendar invite.
- Turn on a custom virtual background or, better, a clean physical background, because attendees judge production value fast and a messy bookshelf behind you undoes a lot of good copywriting.
- Use Zoom’s “Spotlight” feature to keep the focus on you or your slides, not on attendees fidgeting on camera.
- Send the calendar invite with a proper.ics attachment through Mailchimp rather than relying on people to remember, because forgetting is the single biggest reason show-up rates sit around 40 percent industry-wide.
None of this costs money. It costs about twenty minutes of setup the first time you do it, and then it’s a template you reuse for every webinar after.
When it’s finally worth paying for a proper platform
I’m not against paid tools on principle, I just think most people reach for them far too early. It’s worth paying for a dedicated platform once you hit one of these thresholds:
- You’re running more than two webinars a month and the manual reminder-email admin is eating real hours you could spend selling.
- You need automated evergreen replays because your funnel depends on always-on webinars rather than scheduled live ones.
- You’re regularly attracting more than 500 registrants and need attendee capacity beyond what free Zoom or Zoom Pro offers.
- You need registrant data flowing directly into a proper CRM for lead management without manual exports, because you’re handing leads to a sales team and can’t afford gaps.
If none of those apply to you yet, don’t buy the platform. Buy yourself a better list and a sharper offer instead, and put the £780 a year you’d have spent on software towards ads or a copywriter.
A quick note on what “webinar” even means here
Part of the confusion in this space comes from people using “webinar” to mean wildly different things: a 15-person live training, a 500-person product launch, a pre-recorded evergreen funnel. If you’re not sure which one you’re building, it’s worth reading what “webinar” means when you’re hosting on Zoom before you commit to a stack, because the free version I’ve described here is built for the first two, not the third. And if this is your first time running one, the full mechanics are covered step by step in this guide to hosting a webinar on Zoom.
Once you’ve run a few of these and you’re tracking numbers, it’s worth checking your results against what counts as a good conversion rate for your industry, rather than assuming a low number means your free tools let you down. Nine times out of ten, it’s the list or the offer, not the software.
Frequently asked questions
Can Zoom’s free plan run a full webinar?
Yes for groups under 40 minutes, which is enough for a tight 30-minute presentation plus a short Q&A. Anything longer, or anything with more content, needs Zoom Pro at £11.99 a month, which is still far cheaper than any dedicated webinar platform.
What’s the biggest mistake people make trying to run webinars cheaply?
Skipping the reminder email sequence to save time. That single sequence, sent immediately, 24 hours before, and 30 minutes before, is responsible for most of your show-up rate, and cutting it to save an hour of admin can halve your attendance.
Do I need a landing page builder if I’m not paying for a webinar platform?
No. A free Google Form works fine for registration and connects to Mailchimp’s free tier through Zapier’s free plan. Zoom Pro also includes a basic built-in registration page if you’d rather skip the form entirely.
When should I upgrade from free tools to a paid webinar platform?
Once you’re running more than two webinars a month, need automated evergreen replays, or regularly get more than 500 registrants. Below those thresholds, a paid platform is mostly buying you convenience, not better conversions.
