Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.

At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.

I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too

See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...

It is open source and you can self host it.

It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/

Oh, so I was missing something!

That was not very obvious from their landing page!

Well in that case, carry on!

go to product > self-hosting

you might notice it's 100% free software

now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever

but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool

and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later

Sadly as with many such products, if you want SSO and the like, you'll still end up paying per user per month. That gets stupid expensive quick

> That was not very obvious from their landing page!

It says in bold letters:

"Your data is yours!

For ultimate control and compliance, self-host Zulip’s 100% open-source software"

Or not.

> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our Zulip Cloud customers.

> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions. There is no “open core” catch — just freely available world-class software.

The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on self-hosted Zulip.

Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site. In this case they apparently meant it, but to me that just registers as marketing speech.

I guess I've been on the internet too long, my brain automatically blacks certain language out, like a biological spam filter.

> Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site.

...You could go to the Slack website right now and see? We're on the internet. It's all on the internet. We can literally just check.

Doesn't seem to mention anything about being open source, anything privacy-related, data, or hosting.

That's exciting! I didn't catch that from the pricing page, thank you for clarifying :)