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It's funny because recently there was some drama around Rocket Chat with release 6.5.0. They introduced a new "free" tier in addition to the "community" version

It's funny because recently there was some drama around Rocket Chat with release 6.5.0. They introduced a new "free" tier in addition to the "community" version where the latter introduced a user limit of 25. During the upgrade to 6.5.0 existing Rocket installations also were switched to the new "free" tier and thus got the new user limit. It was possible to uncheck some boxes to get back to "community" but it caused a lot of confusion among Rocket users/admins. https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/31149 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/31149 As of yet notifications ("up to 10,000 free monthly push notifications") are still free on the community version, though, as far as I know. Not that I necessarily want to promote Rocket.

deleted 3y ago
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tabbott 3y ago
We of course carefully looked at following Rocket.Chat's previous business model of metering notifications. A lot of incentive and predictability problems with a per-notification pricing plan that I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 apply, though to a lesser extent, because a lot of potential customers will be far from the threshold. (FWIW, 10k mobile push notifications a month sounds high, but it is not a very high limit; in practice, a lot of teams of fewer than 25 users exceed it.) I will say that we put a lot of careful design and engineering effort into doing this transition in a way that cannot result in unpleasant surprises like upgrading to the latest release breaking a feature you're relying on. Using a 100% open source product provides customers with a lot of protection against bad behavior by vendors. If you're using a proprietary product (including the paid/proprietary versions of open core products that market themselves as open source), the vendor has a huge amount of power to move a feature you need to their Enterprise plan that costs 5x as much, and if they do that, you're stuck either running an old version (which will accumulate serious known security vulnerabilities), upgrading and dealing with the changes, or migrating to an alternative, which in situations where the product has all your data in it, can easily cost far more in than the product itself. I can't say I have all the answers for how commercial open source software should work. I can tell you that open core is a much easier business model. The hope is that people do care about the very significant benefits that come with using well-engineered, no tricks, 100% open source software, and that businesses that are relying on open-source software are willing to pay for the services and support that they need to succeed with it. Time will tell.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > the vendor has a huge amount of power to move a feature you need to their Enterprise plan that costs 5x as much That sounds a bit like being forced to move to any plan at all (x infinity price) for a feature that you need (mobile notifications). Except that you don’t even have the option of running an old version. The problem here being that the cost feels way out of proportion for the service being provided.

deleted 3y ago

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tabbott 3y ago

We of course carefully looked at following Rocket.Chat's previous business model of metering notifications. A lot of incentive and predictability problems with a per-notification pricing plan that I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 apply, though to a lesser extent, because a lot of potential customers will be far from the threshold. (FWIW, 10k mobile push notifications a month sounds high, but it is not a very high limit; in practice, a lot of teams of fewer than 25 users exceed it.) I will say that we put a lot of careful design and engineering effort into doing this transition in a way that cannot result in unpleasant surprises like upgrading to the latest release breaking a feature you're relying on. Using a 100% open source product provides customers with a lot of protection against bad behavior by vendors. If you're using a proprietary product (including the paid/proprietary versions of open core products that market themselves as open source), the vendor has a huge amount of power to move a feature you need to their Enterprise plan that costs 5x as much, and if they do that, you're stuck either running an old version (which will accumulate serious known security vulnerabilities), upgrading and dealing with the changes, or migrating to an alternative, which in situations where the product has all your data in it, can easily cost far more in than the product itself. I can't say I have all the answers for how commercial open source software should work. I can tell you that open core is a much easier business model. The hope is that people do care about the very significant benefits that come with using well-engineered, no tricks, 100% open source software, and that businesses that are relying on open-source software are willing to pay for the services and support that they need to succeed with it. Time will tell.

Aeolun 3y ago
> the vendor has a huge amount of power to move a feature you need to their Enterprise plan that costs 5x as much That sounds a bit like being forced to move to any plan at all (x infinity price) for a feature that you need (mobile notifications). Except that you don’t even have the option of running an old version. The problem here being that the cost feels way out of proportion for the service being provided.