I feel like the comment is a bit disingenuous, however; the complaint isn't "Zulip Business only includes push notifications" - rather, it's "the only thing I'd want out of paying for Zulip is push notifications." And indeed I would very happily pay for just notifications (which I assume costs a negligible fraction of the pricing) if it was a more reasonable price point (on the order of say, a dollar per user per month would still be a very healthy margin).

I suspect a lot of folks in a similar boat as me - sysadmins who pushed for Zulip as a Slack alternative at a small startup (with a nontrivial amount of convincing!) and are happy to deal with the hassles of self-hosting and don't ask for support. Having the price be exactly the same as a fully hosted solution, given the particular set of needs, then does feel like too much. I get that support is expensive, but having the option to not get support would be nice.

Of course, I totally get that you need to stay afloat, and it might be a short term way to get some money out of self-hosted customers. But it removes things that make Zulip appealing to someone who doesn't want support and would like to pay a more nominal fee for notifications (and certainly makes me less a lot likely to recommend it to someone setting up a new chat system, and I've done this a few times already).

This is not a change motivated by short-term needs.

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.

Yes, we are extremely capital-efficient with a small core team who have taken some very big pay cuts to work on 100% open-source software. But even so, we need a business model that makes sense. A business model based on charging a small markup on top of the marginal costs of delivering notifications can't fund investments in the Zulip main experience or the self-hosted Zulip experience.

The main revenue source for Zulip thus far has been Zulip Cloud, and it's proven hard to grow that business, largely due to competition with the $0 price of self-hosting Zulip, which gets you most of the features of Slack Plus ($12.50/user/month).

Zulip needs a healthy model where businesses that self-host Zulip (and rely on the SaaS push notifications service) contribute to its development, just like those that use the SaaS Zulip Cloud service. This doesn't specifically require the same pricing for the two products. But it does preclude a model where Zulip Business only includes push notifications and is extremely cheap.

On the specifics of pricing, we of course have had a lot of conversations with users prior to this announcement. Most of the objections we heard were from system administrators who told us they would struggle to convince their company to pay even $1/user/month -- either because it was a big company whose bureaucracy had "already bought Microsoft Teams", or because they were a startup that had a very very high bar for paying for software at all.

Meanwhile when we talked to leaders who make purchasing decisions for their company, they tend to think about budgets in comparison with other applications that their business relies on, or else compare with fully-loaded costs per employee, which are along the lines of 1000x the price of Zulip Business. Reactions tend to be: "$6.67/employee/month? That's nothing, I pay several times that for X, Y, and Z, which we use way less than our primary team collaboration tool."

If you think it's priced too high, I'd really appreciate it if you chat with whoever at your business would approve spending money on your Zulip installation, get their feedback, and send us an email. There may well be some categories of customers that we missed in those conversations, and specific examples are very helpful for considering whether there's a gap in our pricing model that we can patch.

In particular, "We are not turning Zulip into a proprietary product with an “open core” demo version" doesn't ring too true, given that a key component that must also be pretty inexpensive to run is walled off (self-hosting the notification server is explicitly discouraged by the Zulip documentation and would require re-compiling both iOS and Android apps).

I've been evangelizing Zulip for a long time but this feels like it's being slowly turned into Slack, and the open source/self-hosting proposition lost a lot of value.

You want a plan with push but without support, and I sympathize, but I also understand why they wouldn't. Once you start paying, you expect support.

Given the app store rules, this seems like the Zulip team has no choice in this matter.

If I'm wrong, and it is possible to have an app whose notification server is configurable at run time, then only one person needs to do the work to modify and publish that binary. Everyone else who wants to self-host a Zulip notification server can use that same binary.

When you want to send a push notification to the app you use an API key from that developer account. This lets Apple/Google know which app to send it to and confirms you have the permission to do it.

If Zulip wanted to allow a self-hosted notifications server to send notifications directly to Apple/Google and into the app they publish on the app stores then they would need to give out the API key from their developer account to everyone.

You wouldn't be able to do much without the matching device push token (a unique token per device which lets Apple/Google know which device you want to send a message to) but anyone could use that API token to attempt to spam messages which is a quick way to get your developer account banned, or at the very least have your access to the push API severly limited.

No, it's pretty clear it doesn't change anything about uts open source status. No definition ever required that authors run the services for you.

Why? From my POV, push notifications are sort of an edge case, useful only for a handful of people who need synchronous communication in their mobile device. I disable notifications for most apps I use anyway, they do nothing but annoy me.

What I'm saying is, this very much depends on the use-case and work style. If my most used productivity app lost notifications, I wouldn't even notice.

Specifically, a Red-tailed hawk scream. Ex: https://youtu.be/33DWqRyAAUw

> Pro-independence parties gained a majority of the votes for the first time in an election and increased their parliamentary majority

You might be thinking about the 2017 election, but even then, the fact that Ciutadans had the most votes had to do with the pro-independence parties being split.