+1 to this. I am one of those "folks in a similar boat". I have spent the last month planning a migration of our team to self-hosted Zulip. I've utilized the great documentation and never once reached out to support for assistance. We are a team of 11, which means we now have to pay over $1k/year to use a fully-functional version of Zulip. We would have been happy to pay for notifications, but this is too much of a jump. I spent a portion of the afternoon researching Matrix Element as a possible alternative for our chat needs.