6 ms·

This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly

This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5 users (with another $2/user surcharge) is high for what I'd expect is a logical separation of tenants under the hood. I know some of the Matrix folks pop in to HN threads from time to time, and I'll readily admit my woeful inexperience in all things business. That said, could someone enlighten me as to how the pricing strategy was determined? It seems like the better route would have been to create an obscenely cheap plan on the low end for groups/families and push for enterprise adoption (perhaps even with increased prices, $75/mo for 25 users seems on the low end at first glance). Edit: Just re-read the first paragraph and caught this: "You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data." The whole reason I'm using element is because I don't trust anyone else with my data & social connections, and so I'd like to own as much of that scope as possible. I'm sure it's just a poorly worded marketing zinger, but it's unfortunate nonetheless.

anotherboffin 6y ago
I also think the explanation could use a bit of work. If I have more than 5 users, do I need to switch to Nickel? Get another Home plan?
- HolidayHuckle 6y ago
  Up to 5 Monthly Active Users are included in your subscription. After that you can add additional users at an additional $2 per user per month. It's worth noting that the Monthly Active bit can be quite important. What this means is that you're not charged for the number of users registered on your server, but the number who are actively using the server. Users are only considered as "active" and counting towards the number that you pay for if they use the account for more than two days in a rolling 30 day period. The aim here is that you're not penalised for occasional or "drive-by" users of the service. (Disclaimer -- I head up EMS (Element Matrix Services))
  - remram 6y ago
    This is so much more expensive than Slack. If you were comparable you might have a sell with E2EE but this seems way off. [edit: seems like I failed to parse Slack's pricing page. Slack is expensive as hell. Carry on]
    - kitkat_new 6y ago
      Are you kdding? Slack is at least three times that: > €6.25 per active user per month billed annually. > Or, €7.50 per active user per month, billed monthly. https://slack.com/pricing/standard?from_pricing=1 https://slack.com/pricing/standard?from_pricing=1
      - remram 6y ago
        The mobile page wasn't that clear... That is not cheap at all. Thanks.
  - gorgonzolachz 6y ago
    That's smart - I know I've had a couple of folks interested enough to download the app, but not interested enough to use it on a daily basis. If I may, I'd like to push a little deeper on this. Why the single-digit user limit at that price? Doubling or quadrupling the users, or halving the price, would make it a no-brainer of an option to point people to if they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up their own server. As it stands, the pricing feels restrictive to the point where I would feel punished for growing my server (I'd instead tell someone to get their own matrix.org address, at which point it sounds like we could just use Discord/Signal/Slack?). The extra financial burden (these are my family and friends, so I would never ask them to chip in) would actually incentivize me to keep my server as small as possible, which is the antithesis of what the goal of a hosted service should be. As I write this, I'm realizing that there's no real utility here for anyone technical enough to warm to Matrix/Element's strengths. We can talk about the everyman who's not on HN all we want, but my hunch is that those people would rather just use Signal or Discord based on their use-case - no confusing concepts like "homeservers" and "federation". With a user limit and the current pricing model, every use-case (from a short tryout to a long-term personal homserver) is better served either by the free matrix.org model or by a self-hosted solution.
hiq 6y ago
I had the same thought, but do your dozen folks use video calls on your instance? Does it work well enough? I'd definitely expect to be able to host a text-only instance for $5, but maybe they also need to provision for more demanding features? I only use Element / Matrix as an IRC replacement for now so I couldn't tell.
- teraku 6y ago
  AFAIK, Matrix does not support Video chat yet? But the VoIP/audio chat is using WebRTC, so Matrix is only the signalling server and the audio is p2p between the participants. As such the strain on the hosting server should be minimal
  - roblabla 6y ago
    Even if it's P2P, you still need TURN servers because participants might be behind NAT that are hard to pierce through. This basically means you're proxying the full video traffic between both participants.
    - crescit_eundo 6y ago
      Have you had success with encrypting TURN servers? In trying to host my own Matrix server and have E2E encryption for texts, video, and voice, I found that video/voice had to be disabled as Let's Encrypt and SSL weren't compatible.
      - reitanuki 6y ago
        You definitely can make it work with Let's Encrypt, that shouldn't disturb anything. Setting up STUN and TURN is a real pain, though, if you run into any issues.
        crescit_eundo 6y ago
        Interesting! Were you able to set up a fully encrypted TURN server to use with Matrix? Any tips? I wasn't able to succesfully.
3np 6y ago
> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. That stood out to me as poorly phrased, as well. They're assuming I trust them. Even if I do/would have, it's a turn-off.
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  I agree completely. I thought the point of element and matrix was that I don't trust anyone, and that the messages are e2e encrypted. I guess maybe metadata is still accessible by Element?
  - herrweghw 6y ago
    Calling Matrix decentralized is a little misleading. If's a federated protocol that still relies on user-trusted "home servers". Currently the majority of folks use the `matrix.org` home server, but a number of other folks (like myself) operate their own home server. This means if a user on the matrix.org server is talking to another user either on matrix.org or elsewhere, matrix.org (and the 'elsewhere' participant's server operator) will be able to determine who is talking to who. Also of note is that e2ee is optional, which makes sense because Matrix isn't just a replacement for direct user to user or small private group messaging, but also large public groups, where message content is intentionally public, and e2ee just adds overhead.
    - remram 6y ago
      As I understand it, the consensus is to call multi-server systems "federated" and peer-to-peer systems "decentralized". So I agree that Matrix should be called the former and not the later.
- 177tcca 6y ago
  You'd better trust them with your metadata, unless I'm misunderstanding their protocol.
notyourday 6y ago
> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. Yeah, no. Blast from the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554 This is the entity/company who decided to revoke clients keys because not because the users messed up but because they messed up and therefore destroying access to the users messages and defended that as the approach!
- sodality2 6y ago
  Their quote related to the incident and deleting keys (GPG release signing keys on prod machines, no locked down servers, etc leading to the hack): >You might have lost access to your encrypted messages. >As we had to log out all users from matrix.org, if you do not have backups of your encryption keys you will not be able to read your encrypted conversation history. However, if you use server-side encryption key backup (the default in Riot these days) or take manual key backups, you’ll be okay. >This was a difficult choice to make. We weighed the risk of some users losing access to encrypted messages against that of all users' accounts being vulnerable to hijack via the compromised access tokens. We hope you can see why we made the decision to prioritise account integrity over access to encrypted messages, but we're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. [1] I think this shows they simply revoked keys to avoid the hacker accessing messages. Had messages been breached, that would have been significantly worse for an E2EE federated messaging platform. [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-addressed-a-security-breach-updated-2019-04-12 https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-ad...
  - notyourday 6y ago
    They revoked keys of users without giving users a choice, ability to save, backup user messages etc. It is a company with operations, engineering and business ran by amateurs that do not understand the foundation of any user facing business - when you have a choice between not destroying user data and devising a method to handle a situation even if it costs you and losing user data, you do the first. Every single person that gives them his or her data to host is a toddler having a tantrum.
sriku 6y ago
With you. Something more like "element family" where all kith and kin can use it would be more valuable. 5 users for a household is ... weak use case.
rkangel 6y ago
> For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Yes, but how much work was it to get set up in the first place? There's a reason that people pay for Wordpress subscriptions, even though you and I can set up static hosting off Gitlab pages (for example) for free. I do think the pricing is slightly steep but you can charge a premium for making it usable by the masses.
- gorgonzolachz 6y ago
  Anecdotally, it took me about an afternoon. I realize that I'm more technical than the average person, so setting up the certs and installing the python deps was a breeze because I've done it before; the documentation for the synapse homeserver was also quite good. I see where you're coming from, but is this offering geared towards people like that? Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service, and Element as a whole is geared towards the techy DIY crowd. I know there have been concerns raised in other threads about its UX problems, and from personal experience most of my friends don't share the same concerns that I do about data security or bootstrapped personal infrastructure.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    And if $5 a month is worth the hassle of self hosting, I'm glad you have a way to save it. My time is my most valuable resource, if I can get the benefits of self hosting, and not have to do the work, I'll spend that $5 any day.
  - daenney 6y ago
    > Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service How do you mean? I run my own, and there’s zero push to move or migrate to Element Home. I’d imagine this only targets folks with accounts on matrix.org.

anotherboffin 6y ago

I also think the explanation could use a bit of work. If I have more than 5 users, do I need to switch to Nickel? Get another Home plan?

HolidayHuckle 6y ago
Up to 5 Monthly Active Users are included in your subscription. After that you can add additional users at an additional $2 per user per month. It's worth noting that the Monthly Active bit can be quite important. What this means is that you're not charged for the number of users registered on your server, but the number who are actively using the server. Users are only considered as "active" and counting towards the number that you pay for if they use the account for more than two days in a rolling 30 day period. The aim here is that you're not penalised for occasional or "drive-by" users of the service. (Disclaimer -- I head up EMS (Element Matrix Services))
- remram 6y ago
  This is so much more expensive than Slack. If you were comparable you might have a sell with E2EE but this seems way off. [edit: seems like I failed to parse Slack's pricing page. Slack is expensive as hell. Carry on]
  - kitkat_new 6y ago
    Are you kdding? Slack is at least three times that: > €6.25 per active user per month billed annually. > Or, €7.50 per active user per month, billed monthly. https://slack.com/pricing/standard?from_pricing=1 https://slack.com/pricing/standard?from_pricing=1
    - remram 6y ago
      The mobile page wasn't that clear... That is not cheap at all. Thanks.
- gorgonzolachz 6y ago
  That's smart - I know I've had a couple of folks interested enough to download the app, but not interested enough to use it on a daily basis. If I may, I'd like to push a little deeper on this. Why the single-digit user limit at that price? Doubling or quadrupling the users, or halving the price, would make it a no-brainer of an option to point people to if they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up their own server. As it stands, the pricing feels restrictive to the point where I would feel punished for growing my server (I'd instead tell someone to get their own matrix.org address, at which point it sounds like we could just use Discord/Signal/Slack?). The extra financial burden (these are my family and friends, so I would never ask them to chip in) would actually incentivize me to keep my server as small as possible, which is the antithesis of what the goal of a hosted service should be. As I write this, I'm realizing that there's no real utility here for anyone technical enough to warm to Matrix/Element's strengths. We can talk about the everyman who's not on HN all we want, but my hunch is that those people would rather just use Signal or Discord based on their use-case - no confusing concepts like "homeservers" and "federation". With a user limit and the current pricing model, every use-case (from a short tryout to a long-term personal homserver) is better served either by the free matrix.org model or by a self-hosted solution.

hiq 6y ago

I had the same thought, but do your dozen folks use video calls on your instance? Does it work well enough? I'd definitely expect to be able to host a text-only instance for $5, but maybe they also need to provision for more demanding features? I only use Element / Matrix as an IRC replacement for now so I couldn't tell.

teraku 6y ago
AFAIK, Matrix does not support Video chat yet? But the VoIP/audio chat is using WebRTC, so Matrix is only the signalling server and the audio is p2p between the participants. As such the strain on the hosting server should be minimal
- roblabla 6y ago
  Even if it's P2P, you still need TURN servers because participants might be behind NAT that are hard to pierce through. This basically means you're proxying the full video traffic between both participants.
  - crescit_eundo 6y ago
    Have you had success with encrypting TURN servers? In trying to host my own Matrix server and have E2E encryption for texts, video, and voice, I found that video/voice had to be disabled as Let's Encrypt and SSL weren't compatible.
    - reitanuki 6y ago
      You definitely can make it work with Let's Encrypt, that shouldn't disturb anything. Setting up STUN and TURN is a real pain, though, if you run into any issues.
      - crescit_eundo 6y ago
        Interesting! Were you able to set up a fully encrypted TURN server to use with Matrix? Any tips? I wasn't able to succesfully.

3np 6y ago

> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. That stood out to me as poorly phrased, as well. They're assuming I trust them. Even if I do/would have, it's a turn-off.

nightowl_games 6y ago
I agree completely. I thought the point of element and matrix was that I don't trust anyone, and that the messages are e2e encrypted. I guess maybe metadata is still accessible by Element?
- herrweghw 6y ago
  Calling Matrix decentralized is a little misleading. If's a federated protocol that still relies on user-trusted "home servers". Currently the majority of folks use the `matrix.org` home server, but a number of other folks (like myself) operate their own home server. This means if a user on the matrix.org server is talking to another user either on matrix.org or elsewhere, matrix.org (and the 'elsewhere' participant's server operator) will be able to determine who is talking to who. Also of note is that e2ee is optional, which makes sense because Matrix isn't just a replacement for direct user to user or small private group messaging, but also large public groups, where message content is intentionally public, and e2ee just adds overhead.
  - remram 6y ago
    As I understand it, the consensus is to call multi-server systems "federated" and peer-to-peer systems "decentralized". So I agree that Matrix should be called the former and not the later.
177tcca 6y ago
You'd better trust them with your metadata, unless I'm misunderstanding their protocol.

notyourday 6y ago

> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. Yeah, no. Blast from the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554 This is the entity/company who decided to revoke clients keys because not because the users messed up but because they messed up and therefore destroying access to the users messages and defended that as the approach!

sodality2 6y ago
Their quote related to the incident and deleting keys (GPG release signing keys on prod machines, no locked down servers, etc leading to the hack): >You might have lost access to your encrypted messages. >As we had to log out all users from matrix.org, if you do not have backups of your encryption keys you will not be able to read your encrypted conversation history. However, if you use server-side encryption key backup (the default in Riot these days) or take manual key backups, you’ll be okay. >This was a difficult choice to make. We weighed the risk of some users losing access to encrypted messages against that of all users' accounts being vulnerable to hijack via the compromised access tokens. We hope you can see why we made the decision to prioritise account integrity over access to encrypted messages, but we're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. [1] I think this shows they simply revoked keys to avoid the hacker accessing messages. Had messages been breached, that would have been significantly worse for an E2EE federated messaging platform. [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-addressed-a-security-breach-updated-2019-04-12 https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-ad...
- notyourday 6y ago
  They revoked keys of users without giving users a choice, ability to save, backup user messages etc. It is a company with operations, engineering and business ran by amateurs that do not understand the foundation of any user facing business - when you have a choice between not destroying user data and devising a method to handle a situation even if it costs you and losing user data, you do the first. Every single person that gives them his or her data to host is a toddler having a tantrum.

sriku 6y ago

With you. Something more like "element family" where all kith and kin can use it would be more valuable. 5 users for a household is ... weak use case.

rkangel 6y ago

> For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Yes, but how much work was it to get set up in the first place? There's a reason that people pay for Wordpress subscriptions, even though you and I can set up static hosting off Gitlab pages (for example) for free. I do think the pricing is slightly steep but you can charge a premium for making it usable by the masses.

gorgonzolachz 6y ago
Anecdotally, it took me about an afternoon. I realize that I'm more technical than the average person, so setting up the certs and installing the python deps was a breeze because I've done it before; the documentation for the synapse homeserver was also quite good. I see where you're coming from, but is this offering geared towards people like that? Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service, and Element as a whole is geared towards the techy DIY crowd. I know there have been concerns raised in other threads about its UX problems, and from personal experience most of my friends don't share the same concerns that I do about data security or bootstrapped personal infrastructure.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  And if $5 a month is worth the hassle of self hosting, I'm glad you have a way to save it. My time is my most valuable resource, if I can get the benefits of self hosting, and not have to do the work, I'll spend that $5 any day.
- daenney 6y ago
  > Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service How do you mean? I run my own, and there’s zero push to move or migrate to Element Home. I’d imagine this only targets folks with accounts on matrix.org.