Really appreciate you chiming in. (Also, as much as I really don't like the pricing change, I do really appreciate Zulip and its features!)
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 quite disappointing - having the same pricing as a fully managed Zulip Cloud for simply getting push notifications (at $8/user/mo!) is really steep and feels like a clear way to push people to Zulip Cloud and discourage self-hosting.
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.
Sadly they dropped the new intro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFhkzK7jkKg ) they debuted on the last video, and goes really hard. Don't get me wrong, I love the production value on classic CSB videos too, but they truly went the extra mile there.
> 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.
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).