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It is just one comment on Y Combinator's link aggregation service. People who haven't tried starting a serious FOSS project, do not understand how unsustainable it is. Funny thing is, like you mentioned, the monetisation isn't even imposed on the software itself, the entire software is free. It is on the *gratis* service to host it.

Entitlement knows no bounds. Don't worry about those disheartening comments, they are not coming from a place of genuine concern.

Hey friend, just wanted to chime in and say please don't be demoralised. Building a thriving business AND being OSS is extremely hard (I also work in this space) and I have immense respect for anyone who chooses to try and balance those things. Your work means a lot to me and my organisation, please keep building awesome stuff!

Did the person say they oppose all forms of FOSS monetization?

I wrote my comment because I want you to stop this practice. Being demoralized doesn't appear to change your mind about the decision to do what not a single other FOSS messaging app out there does. Zulip is the only one. Maybe reconsider Zulip's stance given how completely alone it is in its choice.

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.

You are not an user/customer but you want to change the project? That's definitely not a fair warning, you are being completely unreasonable and should spend your time better in place of smearing other people's work with baseless accusations. People like you kill others motivation to do good for others for some kind of sadistic pleasure

I was a user. They're not baseless accusations, they're statements of technical fact and a statement of ethical belief. I don't believe it's right to deny users (including non-business users like myself) a capability that costs peanuts to run as a strong-arming tactic to get them to pay. I know exactly what I'm critiquing and why.

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.

Zulip's notifications service is free for community use, as well as business use up to 10 users. If you're not a business, why would you need to build a fork? Just spend 5 minutes filling out the brief community plan form and you're all set.

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?

Your comment made me want to check other FOSS messaging apps!

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.

Delta Chat does provide notifications.

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.

DeltaChat, when using a self-hosted Chatmail server, has a service that detects incoming mails for a user account, pulls a token ID out of their account info (file in the maildir), and sends a request over HTTP to the push server run by the DeltaChat team. This sends it on through APNS/FCM, then scrubs the data from memory. The notification only wakes up the app. No encryption needed.

The project runs on a shoestring budget and has no problem delivering 15 million+ push notifications per month without charging the users any money

As of 18 months ago, both Mattermost and Rocket.Chat, the other popular self-hostable alternatives to Slack, required a paid plan for mobile push notifications at the time we started charging for them (they are open core, so they also gate dozens of other features on paid plans). We didn't invent the idea.

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).

You've left out Element, which does provide a similar suite of features with its Spaces. I concede Mattermost and Rocket.Chat. Thanks for the correction.

Yeah, Element hasn't tried push notifications for monetization, and they are FOSS. I will note https://element.io/pricing only advertises self-hosting options starting at $10/user/month.

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.