Zulip Blog

Following up on this thread, we spent a bunch of time talking to users over the last few days and have done more or less exactly that: https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-commercial-supp…

> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly. As a huge fan of Zulip the app and the team behind it, I have intensely mixed feelings about the AI-ness of it all. But this does seem to be the most responsible way forward. Zulip needed to be able to outlast its founders to be a truly sustainable project. The way they've focused on building up their contribution pipeline, the effort they spend on mentoring new developers, it has all built towards that being possible. https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-test-of-tim… It seems like just yesterday that the core team started experimenting with using Claude to work on Zulip, which maybe adds to the surprise of this announcement. But I don't begrudge those individuals their choices. Ten+ years is a long time to work on any project. https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/ Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.

Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-history/

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-supp… Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799

Wasn't Zulip grandstanding about remaining free when Mattermost removed their free plan [0]? I guess no "free forever" promise was made about push notifications, and the free cloud plan remains, but billing the self-hosters feels bizarre to me. It would make more sense to provide them with a way to self-host the push infra and assume the cost themselves. [0] https://blog.zulip.com/2023/05/04/when-free-forever-is-4-months/

Zulip have web community support. https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/

Much easier to read: https://blog.zulip.com/2022/02/25/zulip-cloud-invitation-vulnerability…

Also, have you seen digital storytelling? -- Basically powerpoint + voiceover as a way to share messages. Low bandwidth, realatively easy for teachers to create, and a good medium for communication Also, this just came up [1], and they talk about its use in teaching, though I dont know if it gives you anything beyond the apps students already have? [1] https://blog.zulip.com/2020/07/16/zulip-3-0-released/

I'm a Zulip fan (and poster of this story), so you can take this with a grain of salt if you want. 1. Regarding "minimal costs" of notifications, the project lead said in an HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661960) from when this was announced, "The problem statement is not that we need to fund the costs of delivering push notifications. We need to fund the costs of building Zulip -- the server, apps for every platform, support for a vast range of different self-hosted configurations, etc." That was on the announcement thread on HN, so you can find more from him and other commenters there. 2. They offer free plans (for the app/service itself, and also just notifications if you're self-hosted) for lots of non-commercial organizations (including open source projects and communities). Discounts for larger non-profits and others. The info is prominent on their pricing page: https://zulip.com/plans/ 3. There's a discounted plan for just mobile notifications. Here's their original announcement post, with an update linked to from the top: https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/15/new-plans-for-self-hosted-customers/

> It's well known that a non-profit sitting close to a for-profit just is often just a structural maneuver at this point. A case in point is the recent WordPress controversy. I agree there. Which is why we have been separating Matrix and Element more and more - eg by setting up the Governing Board https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/electing-our-first-governing-board/ and removing as much of the historical interdependencies as possible. Just as Mozilla severed itself from Rust, or W3C is independent of browser vendors. > So it has an ecosystem with a subset of its former participants. Some of those who are gone see it as closed. Probably not just me. Probably, hence my enthusiasm in trying to set the record straight :| > the repo was literally transferred, though? No… it’s still there at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse. The Fdn archived it given they have no resources to maintain it. > With all its issues? The name & description of each issue (not comments) was copied over to avoid breaking the numbering system and relative links, with a link back to the issue on the old repo. > As well as the trademark? There is no Synapse trademark and never has been… The Matrix trademark continues to live with the Foundation, as you’d expect. > I'm representing my perspective, and you're representing yours. As is your right. My point is that yours is littered with factual bugs, but you have been presenting it on HN as accurate, which is frustratingly misleading. > So the…

This looks distressingly similar to https://blog.zulip.com/2021/03/20/zulip-cloud-security-incident/ . Klarna: Our app is configured specifically to avoid inadvertent caching through the use of cache control directives found in the HTTP standard (no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate). However, the CDN configuration can at times override the app configuration. Zulip: Zulip separately marks its responses as non-cacheable, both to prevent private data from being sent to the wrong user, and also to prevent stale data from being sent even to the right user. Indicating that a response is not cacheable is the purpose of Zulip’s Cache-Control header: max-age=0 [...] no-cache [...] no-store [...] must-revalidate [...] private [...] CloudFront usually respects the Cache-Control and Expires headers, but with one critical exception when receiving multiple similar requests at roughly the same time It looks like Klarna's main website uses CloudFront, so I bet this was the exact same thing.