Thank you for your support and direct feedback. We are listening and appreciate every single one of your posts and replies.
We realize that some of you have connected mobile push notifications directly through Google and Apple and do not need to use our push gateway. This update will not apply to you.
Of course, if you are on our cloud service which includes push notifications, this also does not apply to you.
For those who have deployed the server on-premises, and decided to use our push gateway, we like to thank all who have registered and are now able to access real-time statistics on the volume of push notification you use.
As of today, October 16, 2020, we have not acted on enforcing an across-the-board cap on the use of our push gateways yet. Please refer to my update on the initial message from Jan 2019, the reasons for capping our push gateway usage.
Currently, our plan is to roll out the 5,000 pushes/month limit on November 16, 2020. Administrators of registered servers will receive a direct notification at least two weeks before the rollout.
I will update you here again should our plan change in the near future. Thank you again for your continued support.
Is there anything you folks can do for the FOSS communities which use Rocket Chat? While looking at our usage stats, we have not yet come close, but it’d be nice to not have to worry.
As addition to what @Andreas said. If there would be a check (Is this user online on the website or the Desktop App?) before any push notification is send, it would cut our usage almost in half.
1st of all i noticed during last month or two, even when i am online and reading all messages i am receiving, the mobile app still sends me push notifications of those messages, so the push notification sends anyway (online, offline, already received …etc) !!, that needs to be fixed before applying the limit app.
2nd, as administrator, i need option setting to set the max number of notifications for each user, or even who can use the push notification and who can’t
3rd thing, due to Covid-19 global issue and the coming 2nd wave of it, most of the companies are working from home, so 5k limit is not enough for that situation. If avg. capacity of a company is 40 emp, so each one can have 4 push notifications only daily!!
I wrote to your support. I wrote to you by email, but I didn’t get a proper response.
HOW and WHERE can I buy push-messages for the “Community Edition” chat? You made limits, but you didn’t SAY how to overcome them.
Where can I buy the package of 5/10/20k push-messages per month that gabriel.engel promised? Now I have 1200-1300 messages left, and they will end this Saturday. This will be the downfall of my company.
Just in case, I will add: I am not interested in additional options from the “Pro” or “Enterprise” tariff plans. I’m only interested in push messages. I’m willing to pay 10-20 or even 30$ a month for the ability to receive push messages, but not 30$ a year per user or something like that.
For me, this whole situation looks extremely strange. Because you created the problem from scratch.
Concur with this. @gabriel.engel you guys really need to have an option - on by default - that does not send a mobile push notification for any messages that have already been read via web app or desktop app. I am constantly receiving push notifications well after I read something on the desktop app - and by “read” I mean the desktop app has marked it as read.
This also - important for admins to be able to override user’s notification settings.
Neither of these things are urgent unless you are charging people for push notifications. But they become urgent in that case. If you are charging people for use of a service, I think you have to give them reasonable ways to control the usage of that service.
It would be nice to make the option “combine push-messages”. If there are 3 or more messages from the user in a row, they will be combined into one large message.
I use a translator, I hope I explained the above clearly.
I have to agree with @sleepawalker.white - there seems to be a real failing with communication here.
There’s this threat that notifications are going to be hard limited in relatively short time period without any (can’t find) information as to how to upgrade to more. I’ve been checking through the forums and seen some proposals about upgrade packages and how the team’s intention is NOT to force users onto Pro / Enterprise packages, but where are these upgrade packages?
I moved my company from Slack to Rocketchat as the Community Edition had all the main features needed and to begin with there was no restriction on notifications. Then the initial announcement about limiting it came out and I can understand it as it is a cost to the RC team. However, to now provide a further update without a clear set of options is just awful communication and handling of the situation.
What are the costs for messaging? FCM / Apple do not charge for actual push notifications. Obviously you guys have a server running to provide the service and there will be support and maintenance requirements. This is more a rhetorical question, I’m not after an answer.
What are your plans for a paid upgrade path for notifications for community installs?
If the push notifications themselves cost effectively nothing surely, as other have said, a per server contribution along the lines of $10/month would probably cover a VAST number of messages and pay towards the server/maintenance/support costs.
I deal with cloud services and systems for my business and know the kinds of systems and costs involved. In my opinion there should be a reasonable cost for the community edition to upgrade the number of push notifications. Before this announcement there should have been a clear set of packages provided to your users. Something doesn’t seem right here and it seems as if you are trying to move people on to the unnecessary pro/enterprise/cloud hosted solutions that have substantial per user recurring costs. The community edition is probably where a large chunk of your userbase and possibly code contributions came from, so to treat this community unfairly will lead to movement to other services and a loss of support in the future.
I have exactly the same history as you, @rc.uk.user. We left Slack.
The reasons are the high cost and the inability to store data on your servers.
I’m already starting to think about switching back to free Slack, and then to some other one element_io, no kidding. Yes, I will incur some losses, but for that I will be fully confident in the transparency of the terms of use. I would not like to do this, because my colleagues and I really liked the convenience of working with Rocket.Chat
How can you charge for extra push notifications when notifcations are already wasted? I can read a message on laptop then later get notifcations on my phone that i didnt need.now u want us to pay for them?!
Great you can donate and get extra allowance, im totally behind that but what if you want more than 15k? Is there a similar pricing structure to move upwards and is there a limit?
Maintaining our own apps to use push is annoying but if we really had to ok, problem is i have seen posts on this forum that apple have been rejecting apps because of almost identical code, what plans do you have for that?
Can notifcations be merged?
I am relatively new to rocket and quite like it, i have put a lot of time in the past month to get it to where i want and the outputs of this conversation will make the decision of our future here
@jdaviescoates I made a slight mistake in my calculations. I thought push messages would end on Saturday, but as it turned out, it will be tomorrow.
Again, I got the limits, but I didn’t get the method of overcoming them. I’m confused. I don’t know what to say to my colleagues who use the mobile app.
Welp, it looks like we did a mistake when we chose rocket chat community edition for… you know, a community. A open one, that people could join freely and where we have no limits on the number of users, run by a non-profit with little to no budget.
5k or even 10k notifications a month are not enough.
Paying 30$/user is unthinkable (even with non-profit discount - we have a bunch of users).
