Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

So many stories like this about Slack.

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

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

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/

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

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.