4 ms·

Zulip had flown under the radar for me, looks interesting but the pricing makes me a bit sad. We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so

by tjoff 2y ago

Zulip had flown under the radar for me, looks interesting but the pricing makes me a bit sad. We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client. I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better. I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot. Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number). Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.

cl3misch 2y ago
I feel you. On the other hand, paying $40 a month for 11 people to efficiently communicate doesn't sound that much actually?
- tjoff 2y ago
  Every single service is per user and it adds up. Communications are essential, but there doesn't have to be much to it either. Most communications are 1-1 anyway. We could do everything by SMS and email I guess, it is just not built for that. As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
- cvwright 2y ago
  Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services. From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.
blitzar 2y ago
Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards you personally, but the entire industry that somehow decided that the terms of everyone else's business and products that they are using to get try and individually achieve private jet levels of wealth should be free.
- tjoff 2y ago
  I'm trying to pay an amount that makes sense though. It is like the olden days, where piracy of Photoshop didn't put a dent in Adobe. They got free advertising and everyone grew up learning their product. But since you could get the "best" tool for free that meant you wouldn't pay for a cheap alternative (that actually had you as their target group), completely killing an entire section of applications - they were the true victims of piracy. I feel like that is happening with these kinds of tools. Slack et al do have free options that are completely obliterating the hope to target businesses that don't need as much. 99.9% of all the features you are paying for is pure bloat. It costs money to develop and I get that, but then I don't want it either.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    There are too many things you don't wanna buy, it will really take a lot of your time if you go out of your way to tell people you don't wanna spend money on what they have worked. You can just save your wisdom for yourself.
singhrac 2y ago
Maybe they need purchasing power parity adjustment for those outside the US? $3.5/user/month seems lowish compared to peers in the US, though I agree with what you’re saying about how to charge at 10+ users (that is a nice business model that keeps your free tier alive while not changing the economics of the enterprise at all).
v3ss0n 2y ago
You can selfhost, why not?
- tjoff 2y ago
  That is what I'm looking at. But it costs $3.5 per user to self-host if you need mobile notifications.
- Eduard 2y ago
  Apparently, the "self-hosted + free" combination allows mobile push notifications only up to ten 10 users. https://zulip.com/features/ https://zulip.com/features/ https://zulip.com/self-hosting/#self-hosted https://zulip.com/self-hosting/#self-hosted
  - v3ss0n 2y ago
    We are sellf hosting with our own customization for 5 years now. Notification is fine on Desktop. We have 30 developers using. For mobile notification you can just add your own if you care to modify a few lines of code
nrr 2y ago
I suspect that the cost for push notifications might have to do with the costs imposed by Apple and Google for their respective OSes' notifications backends, but don't quote me on that. The $3.5/user/month smells like a way to recoup that kind of cost without making it overly burdensome for folks within one standard deviation of the mean. That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.
- cvwright 2y ago
  I don’t think Apple charges for APNS do they? I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?
  - nrr 2y ago
    It seems you're right. I'm thinking of the third-party APNs (why does Apple insist on the lowercase "s" here?) server providers who do sometimes bill on a per-notification basis. I'll admit that I know basically nothing about how this ecosystem works in 2024, particularly as it relates to push notifications from self-hosted applications as Zulip can sometimes be.
    - cvwright 2y ago
      Ah, yes you do have to run a service of some kind to interface with Apple. For example the Matrix project provides Sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal which the owner of a Matrix client can run on their own systems. It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.
dijit 2y ago
Mobile notifications are almost an antipattern, especially with the Zulip mobile app being what it is. Definitely try it out without bearing the mobile experience any mind.
2Gkashmiri 2y ago
why should a self-hosted server limit notifications by number of users? its not like the dev team is doing any hosting for notifications that they need to pay for bandwidth and stuff? i do understand the need for "charging people somehow", same as how some say their product is open source but you still have to pay per user even when its hosted on your own machines, why bother then? its not like i have "security" concerns from E2EE of facebook. when we are talking "self hosting" then that would mean i get to self-manage but also i am not restricted by features otherwise whats the point? look at zulip for example. their cloud hosted version is plus version for $10/user. same for self-hosted business version at $6.67/user. So at the cost of self hosting and management and storage and administration i am only getting a discount of $3.33? again, why bother at this point?
- dijit 2y ago
  Actually since push notifications for an app are centralised: there is a hosting cost for the app maintainer. There was a blog article from Zulip explaining this. https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-commercial-support/ https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme... Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799
  - dijit 2y ago
    I found the docs: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/7.2/production/mobile-push-notifications.html#why-this-is-necessary https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/7.2/production/mobile-push-n...
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Wait. You want a discount to have access to the source code? So you are ok with paying a premium to NOT have access to it?
- cvwright 2y ago
  These prices make sense when you consider that the bulk of the cost of providing Zulip to you is not the cost of the compute and storage and bandwidth - those are fairly minimal. It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stavros 2y ago
I know what you mean, but I'm happier paying for one specific feature that I know costs them than for an arbitrary tier, although the latter is fine too (they have to make money). Generally, Zulip is one of those tools that I'm happy to pay for even if I don't need any of the non-free features. At $40/mo, it's worth it for the multiples of time it'll save you. Definitely try it.
aembleton 2y ago
Have you tried Mattermost? I've never used it but it looks like it might work for you. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- CoolCold 2y ago
  Mattermost works just fine being self-hosted and using push notifications
112233 2y ago
Instead of native push notifications, just configure email: https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email You get to reuse already existing filtering and what not, and everyone can keep using their email client

by tjoff 2y ago

cl3misch 2y ago

I feel you. On the other hand, paying $40 a month for 11 people to efficiently communicate doesn't sound that much actually?

tjoff 2y ago
Every single service is per user and it adds up. Communications are essential, but there doesn't have to be much to it either. Most communications are 1-1 anyway. We could do everything by SMS and email I guess, it is just not built for that. As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
cvwright 2y ago
Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services. From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.

blitzar 2y ago

Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards you personally, but the entire industry that somehow decided that the terms of everyone else's business and products that they are using to get try and individually achieve private jet levels of wealth should be free.

tjoff 2y ago
I'm trying to pay an amount that makes sense though. It is like the olden days, where piracy of Photoshop didn't put a dent in Adobe. They got free advertising and everyone grew up learning their product. But since you could get the "best" tool for free that meant you wouldn't pay for a cheap alternative (that actually had you as their target group), completely killing an entire section of applications - they were the true victims of piracy. I feel like that is happening with these kinds of tools. Slack et al do have free options that are completely obliterating the hope to target businesses that don't need as much. 99.9% of all the features you are paying for is pure bloat. It costs money to develop and I get that, but then I don't want it either.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  There are too many things you don't wanna buy, it will really take a lot of your time if you go out of your way to tell people you don't wanna spend money on what they have worked. You can just save your wisdom for yourself.

singhrac 2y ago

Maybe they need purchasing power parity adjustment for those outside the US? $3.5/user/month seems lowish compared to peers in the US, though I agree with what you’re saying about how to charge at 10+ users (that is a nice business model that keeps your free tier alive while not changing the economics of the enterprise at all).

v3ss0n 2y ago

You can selfhost, why not?

tjoff 2y ago
That is what I'm looking at. But it costs $3.5 per user to self-host if you need mobile notifications.
Eduard 2y ago
Apparently, the "self-hosted + free" combination allows mobile push notifications only up to ten 10 users. https://zulip.com/features/ https://zulip.com/features/ https://zulip.com/self-hosting/#self-hosted https://zulip.com/self-hosting/#self-hosted
- v3ss0n 2y ago
  We are sellf hosting with our own customization for 5 years now. Notification is fine on Desktop. We have 30 developers using. For mobile notification you can just add your own if you care to modify a few lines of code

nrr 2y ago

I suspect that the cost for push notifications might have to do with the costs imposed by Apple and Google for their respective OSes' notifications backends, but don't quote me on that. The $3.5/user/month smells like a way to recoup that kind of cost without making it overly burdensome for folks within one standard deviation of the mean. That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.

cvwright 2y ago
I don’t think Apple charges for APNS do they? I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?
- nrr 2y ago
  It seems you're right. I'm thinking of the third-party APNs (why does Apple insist on the lowercase "s" here?) server providers who do sometimes bill on a per-notification basis. I'll admit that I know basically nothing about how this ecosystem works in 2024, particularly as it relates to push notifications from self-hosted applications as Zulip can sometimes be.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    Ah, yes you do have to run a service of some kind to interface with Apple. For example the Matrix project provides Sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal which the owner of a Matrix client can run on their own systems. It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.

dijit 2y ago

Mobile notifications are almost an antipattern, especially with the Zulip mobile app being what it is. Definitely try it out without bearing the mobile experience any mind.

2Gkashmiri 2y ago

why should a self-hosted server limit notifications by number of users? its not like the dev team is doing any hosting for notifications that they need to pay for bandwidth and stuff? i do understand the need for "charging people somehow", same as how some say their product is open source but you still have to pay per user even when its hosted on your own machines, why bother then? its not like i have "security" concerns from E2EE of facebook. when we are talking "self hosting" then that would mean i get to self-manage but also i am not restricted by features otherwise whats the point? look at zulip for example. their cloud hosted version is plus version for $10/user. same for self-hosted business version at $6.67/user. So at the cost of self hosting and management and storage and administration i am only getting a discount of $3.33? again, why bother at this point?

dijit 2y ago
Actually since push notifications for an app are centralised: there is a hosting cost for the app maintainer. There was a blog article from Zulip explaining this. https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-commercial-support/ https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme... Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799
- dijit 2y ago
  I found the docs: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/7.2/production/mobile-push-notifications.html#why-this-is-necessary https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/7.2/production/mobile-push-n...
meiraleal 2y ago
Wait. You want a discount to have access to the source code? So you are ok with paying a premium to NOT have access to it?
cvwright 2y ago
These prices make sense when you consider that the bulk of the cost of providing Zulip to you is not the cost of the compute and storage and bandwidth - those are fairly minimal. It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

stavros 2y ago

I know what you mean, but I'm happier paying for one specific feature that I know costs them than for an arbitrary tier, although the latter is fine too (they have to make money). Generally, Zulip is one of those tools that I'm happy to pay for even if I don't need any of the non-free features. At $40/mo, it's worth it for the multiples of time it'll save you. Definitely try it.

aembleton 2y ago

Have you tried Mattermost? I've never used it but it looks like it might work for you. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

CoolCold 2y ago
Mattermost works just fine being self-hosted and using push notifications

112233 2y ago

Instead of native push notifications, just configure email: https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email You get to reuse already existing filtering and what not, and everyone can keep using their email client