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.

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.

Agreed.

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.

Following up on this thread, we spent a bunch of time talking to users over the last few days and have done more or less exactly that:

https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme...

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.