Since there's a lot of discussion of it feeling expensive for "just push notifications", I think it's probably worth my addressing that directly as a top-level comment.
Zulip Business costs $6.67/user/month. While the only Zulip feature that can't work without purchasing a plan (or doing a huge amount of work to publish your own mobile apps) is mobile push notifications for businesses with 10+ users, https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted details dozens of features for which Zulip Business includes expert support.
Zulip is 100% open source. In open core products, those specific features just don't exist at all in the open source version. For example, Mattermost requires the proprietary Mattermost Professional [1] at $10/user/month if you want to use SSO, LDAP sync, user groups, read receipts, etc.
(Note also that $10/user/month is the minimum price at which Mattermost offers push notifications "for use in production environments" [2].)
If you compare Zulip's pricing options to Mattermost's, our offering is substantially more generous.
It would be even if we went open core and moved a few dozen features of Zulip to a proprietary version. But we're not going to do that: we really do care about being an 100% open source project.
If you instead compare Zulip Business to using Zulip for your business's mission-critical communications between paid team members without paying for something, I think that's the wrong question. Skilled humans' time is incredibly valuable, and people spend a LOT of time in team chat tools. It is rational for businesses to pay a tiny fraction of the fully-loaded cost of their employees for the insurance that comes with support and mobile push notifications for their main collaboration tool.
(If you're using Zulip for something other than a server full of paid employees and contractors, see the Community plan and discounts for other use cases).
Finally, on the topic of cost to us: Supporting a business that is self-hosting complex, mission-critical software like Zulip is more expensive for us than having that business using Zulip Cloud. Hosting is cheap compared to humans who can debug anything, and there are big economies of scales in terms of human time for managing a large multi-tenant cloud installation.
Helping thousands of different people with varied skill levels self-hosted your application successfully is not cheap, even for a project like Zulip that is very focused on making self-hosting Just Work.
I think the only point you either didn’t get from the comments or have ignored is that there are some people who are willing to pay a small price just for push notifications while self hosting, but not needing support or anything else. That’s a rational thing to ask for. There could be many smaller teams or businesses self hosting precisely because the cost of the hosted solution is high for them. They’ve already been taking care of support for their self hosted platform. Now you’re asking them to pay the same amount that they’ve been avoiding.
I hope you’d rethink on this point. Nothing else matters in this context. Not Mattermost, not Rocket Chat, not the entire open source model.
Would be great to be able to purchase push notifications (for self hosted), at a price point that wasn’t the fully loaded cost of the cloud seat subscription.
Really appreciate you chiming in. (Also, as much as I really don't like the pricing change, I do really appreciate Zulip and its features!)
I feel like the comment is a bit disingenuous, however; the complaint isn't "Zulip Business only includes push notifications" - rather, it's "the only thing I'd want out of paying for Zulip is push notifications." And indeed I would very happily pay for just notifications (which I assume costs a negligible fraction of the pricing) if it was a more reasonable price point (on the order of say, a dollar per user per month would still be a very healthy margin).
I suspect a lot of folks in a similar boat as me - sysadmins who pushed for Zulip as a Slack alternative at a small startup (with a nontrivial amount of convincing!) and are happy to deal with the hassles of self-hosting and don't ask for support. Having the price be exactly the same as a fully hosted solution, given the particular set of needs, then does feel like too much. I get that support is expensive, but having the option to not get support would be nice.
Of course, I totally get that you need to stay afloat, and it might be a short term way to get some money out of self-hosted customers. But it removes things that make Zulip appealing to someone who doesn't want support and would like to pay a more nominal fee for notifications (and certainly makes me less a lot likely to recommend it to someone setting up a new chat system, and I've done this a few times already).
+1 to this. I am one of those "folks in a similar boat". I have spent the last month planning a migration of our team to self-hosted Zulip. I've utilized the great documentation and never once reached out to support for assistance. We are a team of 11, which means we now have to pay over $1k/year to use a fully-functional version of Zulip. We would have been happy to pay for notifications, but this is too much of a jump. I spent a portion of the afternoon researching Matrix Element as a possible alternative for our chat needs.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! I really appreciate it. I'm doing my best to be as transparent as possible, so here's a very long reply.
This is not a change motivated by short-term needs.
The problem statement is not that we need to fund the costs of delivering push notifications. We need to fund the costs of building Zulip -- the server, apps for every platform, support for a vast range of different self-hosted configurations, etc.
Yes, we are extremely capital-efficient with a small core team who have taken some very big pay cuts to work on 100% open-source software. But even so, we need a business model that makes sense. A business model based on charging a small markup on top of the marginal costs of delivering notifications can't fund investments in the Zulip main experience or the self-hosted Zulip experience.
The main revenue source for Zulip thus far has been Zulip Cloud, and it's proven hard to grow that business, largely due to competition with the $0 price of self-hosting Zulip, which gets you most of the features of Slack Plus ($12.50/user/month).
Zulip needs a healthy model where businesses that self-host Zulip (and rely on the SaaS push notifications service) contribute to its development, just like those that use the SaaS Zulip Cloud service. This doesn't specifically require the same pricing for the two products. But it does preclude a model where Zulip Business only includes push notifications and is extremely cheap.
On the specifics of pricing, we of course have had a lot of conversations with users prior to this announcement. Most of the objections we heard were from system administrators who told us they would struggle to convince their company to pay even $1/user/month -- either because it was a big company whose bureaucracy had "already bought Microsoft Teams", or because they were a startup that had a very very high bar for paying for software at all.
Meanwhile when we talked to leaders who make purchasing decisions for their company, they tend to think about budgets in comparison with other applications that their business relies on, or else compare with fully-loaded costs per employee, which are along the lines of 1000x the price of Zulip Business. Reactions tend to be: "$6.67/employee/month? That's nothing, I pay several times that for X, Y, and Z, which we use way less than our primary team collaboration tool."
If you think it's priced too high, I'd really appreciate it if you chat with whoever at your business would approve spending money on your Zulip installation, get their feedback, and send us an email. There may well be some categories of customers that we missed in those conversations, and specific examples are very helpful for considering whether there's a gap in our pricing model that we can patch.
It would be nice if there was a way to tell which users have mobile app installed and which users don't and charge us only for those users that will actually use the feature we are paying for.
+1 make it per user
This decision works against zulip long term, now we have to think before inviting/adding users to our server.
Third rug pulled from under us in a year: zerotier, rport and now zulip.
Zulip Business costs $6.67/user/month. While the only Zulip feature that can't work without purchasing a plan (or doing a huge amount of work to publish your own mobile apps) is mobile push notifications for businesses with 10+ users, https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted details dozens of features for which Zulip Business includes expert support.
Zulip is 100% open source. In open core products, those specific features just don't exist at all in the open source version. For example, Mattermost requires the proprietary Mattermost Professional [1] at $10/user/month if you want to use SSO, LDAP sync, user groups, read receipts, etc.
(Note also that $10/user/month is the minimum price at which Mattermost offers push notifications "for use in production environments" [2].)
If you compare Zulip's pricing options to Mattermost's, our offering is substantially more generous. It would be even if we went open core and moved a few dozen features of Zulip to a proprietary version. But we're not going to do that: we really do care about being an 100% open source project.
If you instead compare Zulip Business to using Zulip for your business's mission-critical communications between paid team members without paying for something, I think that's the wrong question. Skilled humans' time is incredibly valuable, and people spend a LOT of time in team chat tools. It is rational for businesses to pay a tiny fraction of the fully-loaded cost of their employees for the insurance that comes with support and mobile push notifications for their main collaboration tool.
(If you're using Zulip for something other than a server full of paid employees and contractors, see the Community plan and discounts for other use cases).
Finally, on the topic of cost to us: Supporting a business that is self-hosting complex, mission-critical software like Zulip is more expensive for us than having that business using Zulip Cloud. Hosting is cheap compared to humans who can debug anything, and there are big economies of scales in terms of human time for managing a large multi-tenant cloud installation.
Helping thousands of different people with varied skill levels self-hosted your application successfully is not cheap, even for a project like Zulip that is very focused on making self-hosting Just Work.
[1] https://mattermost.com/pricing/features/ [2] https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html