Oh, that's interesting. I did not see any amount of money in those blogposts, do you have an idea how much it cost?

Also it appears Gitter is actually not operating a matrix server, but is instead bridged with https://www.matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/native-gitter-br... ? Does that mean gitter.im is only reachable from matrix.org?

Personally when i had to join a gitter room, i would join from my XMPP account using the @matrix.org gateway (which despite being unreliable is very nice) so i have no clue.