Comment by tabbott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tabbott | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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