Our Slack is dead. Long live Zulip
changelog.com
changelog.com
Every other messaging app out there that is open source covers the minimal costs associated (and for Zulip, with an unpaid userbase that is tiny, these costs are laughably small) to host the infra associated. Note that Firebase Cloud Messaging itself is free. Wire, Signal, Threema, every single XMPP app, Element: none of these force users to build and distribute modded apks just to get notifications.
It was a tactic and it sucked and it burned any and all goodwill I had for Zulip.
1. Regarding "minimal costs" of notifications, the project lead said in an HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661960) from when this was announced, "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." That was on the announcement thread on HN, so you can find more from him and other commenters there.
2. They offer free plans (for the app/service itself, and also just notifications if you're self-hosted) for lots of non-commercial organizations (including open source projects and communities). Discounts for larger non-profits and others. The info is prominent on their pricing page: https://zulip.com/plans/
3. There's a discounted plan for just mobile notifications.
Here's their original announcement post, with an update linked to from the top: https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/15/new-plans-for-self-hosted-...
I guess though that an openpush/unifiedpush(?) client is another thing to install on the phone though. I probably care more about the web version than the mobile apps. I've been using nextcloud talk but it's kind of awful.
For some use cases where self hosting is required for compliance reasons, this is a deal breaker. And spinning your own mobile apps isn't quite practical.
While I'm here, the Flutter rewrite of the mobile app is launching next month, and while the initial launch won't add much functionality over the previous React Native apps, the rewrite is way faster, less buggy, and a lot more pleasant to add new features to.
For what it's worth, Zulip is entirely FOSS. In contrast with most commercial open source software on the market today, Zulip charges only for Cloud hosting, push infrastructure, and support -- not the software itself. We offer free or highly discounted plans for non-business use.
And yet, even we get attacked because we stopped letting businesses use our push infrastructure for free too. How are we supposed to publish a professional quality self-hostable product without any monetization?
If you oppose all forms of FOSS monetization, no matter how reasonable, you're advocating for a world where FOSS cannot compete in many product categories.
And if you want FOSS to succeed in team chat specifically, the real issue is that Microsoft Teams and Slack have entrenched their duopoly with some pretty effective anti-competitive tactics (Microsoft Bundling and Slack Connect, most importantly), and that fact isn't on many people's radar as an issue at all.
Your team made the decision, now you get to own it. And I'll keep putting a light on it until it changes. You call it vitriol, I call it fair warning to anyone considering adopting Zulip.
I am not a business and I certainly would not touch Zulip with a ten-foot pole given your team's decision.
I'm not going to source-build and force a community of folks to source-build an APK to access an essential technical capability of a messaging app. Zulip is essentially rendered as useless in such a case. That is wrong and unethical.
I can't say that the mobile notifications model is perfect. I have my frustrations with it. One of them that might not be obvious is that various military/government installations on airgapped networks are all freeriding.
Alternative options are (1) having no meaningful monetization of self-hosting or (2) moving away from being fully FOSS.
What would you like to see us do?
Briar — no push notifications. IRC - could not find foss client with push notification support (maybe you know one!) Delta chat — do not seem to provide the service themselves.
Briar allows you to run its Mailbox app on another device, giving you the tool to host your own notifications without building your own binary.
I know because I run both.
The project runs on a shoestring budget and has no problem delivering 15 million+ push notifications per month without charging the users any money
For example, Mattermost's $10/user/month plan is proprietary software with roughly the features that Zulip provides as entirely FOSS (with a $3.50/user/month push notifications service).
By the way, since you mentioned Signal: Signal is great, but it's really just not comparable.
Signal is a SMS replacement/messenger app with minimal features that requires very low COGS per user, and launched with a $50M grant from a billionaire. Zulip is a team chat app designed to replace much more complex and capable products (Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams).
I think they've had a pretty frustrating experience with corporations freeriding on their work. See, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129623.
I wish them the best of luck, and hope they're seeing success. Certainly in 2025 Europe should be thinking hard about the risks of a huge portion of workplace communication happening in Cloud-based chat and email applications owned by a few US companies (Microsoft/Google/SalesForce).
Honestly, we've had the same problem that Arathorn highlights in that thread. When I first started, I imagine businesses self-hosting Zulip would pay for support and fund the project that way. In practice, Zulip is too easy to operate for self-hosters to do that, and the better we make the product, the less support people actually need. The support-only business model can work, but I don't think it's workable for chat.
Entitlement knows no bounds. Don't worry about those disheartening comments, they are not coming from a place of genuine concern.