Ahhh -- yeah, I didn't blame them too much, since of course they need to monetize somehow or maybe even were being crushed under the server load (giving bad service even for free might piss off people or invite bad press).

In the end a bunch of these companies are really just using WebRTC under the covers + some improvements/management on their side, so they should be avoiding most of the load (especially since most of them say they can't support >4 people in a room or whatever since that's the traditional limitation of truly p2p webrtc implementations).

thanks for the pointer to talky.io, I also took note of some of the other suggestions in this thread, will be using them as well.