The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.

If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.

Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me.

¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/

Curiously if you ask if they would consider properly supporting notifications from the mobile web version then the answer is always no. Pwa would be perfectly fine but its crippled on Zulip

If you read their announcement for the new paid subscription they do not hide the fact that this is first and foremost designed as a revenue source. One could potentially fork the clients and add such functionality. But they will not do it on their own clients.

Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...).

And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip having monetization for self-hosted business use? (Mobile notifications have always been free for most communities, and we have discount programs for various use cases detailed on our pricing page).

Look, in 2025, and one should be very wary of rugpulls. But Zulip has no venture investors. I've personally funded the project for almost a decade now, so that it can operate in line with our values (https://zulip.com/values/).

I want to use applications that are ethically managed, self-hostable, privacy-supporting, open-source, and excellent. Zulip aims to be that kind of project, and even with all the community contributions that we've fostered, I don't see how we could maintain Zulip responsibly without our professional team.

Should it be a red flag for an open-source application to have monetization that charges businesses for using services operated by its professional team? Or would the red flag be a project that lacks a professional team who one can count on to maintain it responsibly?

Hey, thanks for reaching out and truly appreciate the feedback from the team, not someone random on the internet. When I say ‘red flag’ in this context I never mean comparing Zulip to Slack. For me personally (but I believe for most others too, especially right here) Slack was a no-go since about a decade ago. Slack is just a poster child of a huge massive gargantuan Red Flag. I’d never even consider using it in any possible scenario. Whilst Zulip was my _primary_ consideration to deploy for a small organisation (still more than 10 people). Alongside Mattermost and Matrix, who don’t have these limits. So this thing _feels_ like a red flag in comparison. Here, in sucking comments I do write about Mattermost too, with their nudges to buy Enterprise edition here and there, and everywhere. And about their new limits too. (For which there’s Mostly Matter now.)

This also is a massive red flag for me, and while I understand that they and you Zulip team has to support a professional team, and you have to do that, and you have every right of doing that, and I’m personally very supportive of this-— still, this move leaves the fear of ‘today this, tomorrow something else.’

Speaking of this very case of 10 mobile users limits, I have a few thoughts. First, it’s entirely possible that you communicate this piece not very well, as I had this impression that Mattermost and Matrix don’t do that, hence maybe it’s possible to host the whole thing on my own and have the notifications. Perhaps they just allow users to use their servers for that for free. This moment is unclear for me, and I had to do my research, which mostly failed, since I still do a guesswork here. I am left with this bitter taste that the issue is artificial on Zulip’s side. Again, not saying it’s your fault, I could be someone who did the research poorly. That was my weekend attempt, and I was super limited on time. Next time I may have more time for that research again (I plan to), but it would happen early next year.

Second, it was mentioned somewhere here as well, the active users strategy. You allow for 10 users, meaning if you’re small team or group, go ahead and use Zulip. But I am a part of an organisation who needs their chat, and they are about 100 people across the country (and the country is Ukraine, meaning they have bigger things to worry about than a chat). But among these 100 people most of them are drivers or cars maintenance team, they mostly need no company chat. If they would use it, it’s a couple of messages a day tops. However, there are managers, and they would use the chat very actively, all day long. They are either less than ten or more than ten (up to 15, 20). I not aware of the exact number of people, since in my city they have just three managers, plus two developers, so there are five people plus me who’d use the chat actively. But since there are others, and they need mobile notifications, we cannot consider Zulip (even when we are able to host in on our own entirely) for this, unless we pay. While the company is for-profit, I cannot even think of asking for anything, and understand the company is better to pay and support you. Yet in this very situation, I’m having hard time explaining it to the boss. He won’t pay for these drivers and cars maintenance teams, as they’re dead souls, technically. They are to receive some instructions and ok them, that’s 90% of the communication for them. So while I’d try my luck with pitching company chat (instead of just using WhatsApp or Facebook or Viber or Telegram), that makes sense only for active users, not for mostly idle users that won’t use the chat actively. And in this very situation, it’s mostly texts, so no heavy images or video calls.

Apart from that, your chat looks one of the best among self-hosted options, I plan at trying it with a group of friends, which is less than 10 people. Forgive me if all this is easily verifiable when you actually used the chat. I only deployed it locally to check the interface (was mostly okay), and researched on the perspectives of using it within a relatively big organisation.

Cheers!

I have been following that project for a long time. They are "good people". They want to make sure the project survives. I am bummed about that change and I could probably get the their notification service free if i asked for it (little bit involvement with some things) but I didn't. I respect their decision. Though of course I do have the same concerns as you. I just want to think it won't happen.