This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever. However, the existence of this post also makes Zulip committed deeper to not pull the rug on the free plan. Whenever that happens, I’d like to believe that there would be grandfathering for existing users on the free plan (unlike the rug pull that Google attempted with its free GSuite/Workplace offering and decided to not do it after a lot of backlash and bad press).

One thing I dislike about these chat platforms is limited message history. The 10,000-messages or 90-day message search history limits are arbitrary as well as too short to be useful for any group that has more than a few members on a specific topic/area. For some (or many?) people, this will be a practical and annoying limitation that makes the platform useless for anything other than trivial chats where history doesn’t matter (except for “this is what you said two days ago”).

Instead, they could consider offering very small (?) teams unlimited history. Platforms like Telegram (and Discord too, not sure?) are offering more and more features for free. Enterprise application integrations may be one area where Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat/Zulip may have an advantage for the time being.