Pretty much all companies that care about making a profit and remaining viable offer loss leaders to build a customer base. I'm not saying that is what this is

Pretty much all companies that care about making a profit and remaining viable offer loss leaders to build a customer base. I'm not saying that is what this is but it might be. I doubt the product would have been so widely adopted without the no cost notifications. It would be interesting to see how this affects the continued use by organizations as well as the adoption rate by new users. That said I can't say enough about how solid and adaptable the core server product is. IMHO they have no competitors in this space. Sure there are other options that say they are open source but in reality they are all feature crippled open core distributions. So yeah this is probably a bit of a setback for a segment of users and those affected will need to make some decisions going forward. Maybe at some point they will offer a reasonably priced a la carte version of just the notification service.