Thanks again @Andreas , @tom-s, @pjv, @toddy, @RPQ and @sleepawalker.white for all your valuable comments.
Thanks additionally to all those community members who have reached out directly to us on this, and I trust that we’ve all found a workable solution to accommodate your needs.
We are continuing to listen to every one of your comments.
Please allow me to recap the current situation for those who may be new to this thread.
Rocket.Chat the open source project has integrated the optional use of a mobile push notification gateway service, ran and operated by us, in order to facilitate the out-of-the-box experience of our community. The use of this service has been entirely optional for all on-premises deployed servers, and there exists alternate solutions in-lieu of using this service since day one.
Early 2019, we discovered and disclosed to the community that due to the increasing scale of adoption, we will soon need to start charging the heavy users of this external gateway service. Our intention is for the heavy users to subsidize for (the majority - 80% based on stats at the time) the moderate users in the spirit of the community.
We have been listening to community feedback since early 2019 and have started to take implementation action only in mid 2020.
As a result of the feedback, we are increasing our offer up to 10,000 free mobile push notifications (using our push notifications gateway) per month for any registered on-premises deployed server that decides to use our gateway.
We have also implemented a series of inexpensive Github sponsorship levels to satisfy most community needs up to a maximum of 20,000 mobile push notifications per month (for registered on-premise servers deciding to use our push notifications gateway). All existing Github sponsors already qualified for mobile pushes will have their cap adjusted by 5,000 per month accordingly. Github sponsorships are not stackable.
Again, for open source, NGO or similar organizations, or community contributors in hardship please just reach out to us if you need additional mobile pushes through our gateway, and we can work out something agreeable.
@TheUpsideDown and @RPQ, thank you for assisting in our situation. We are fully aware of, and in no way against, multiple community driven alternative gateways services. While we are unable to directly support your effort at this moment in time, we do appreciate it. Thank you again sincerely.
@pjv thank you for succinctly summarizing some community members’ frustration with our current notification implementation as we turn on the limit on our gateways.
Your two points are very well taken:
- control over messages already read not being counted as mobile push notification
- administrator’s ability to control per user usage of mobile push notification
To this we will add a third point, brought forward privately by another valued community group:
- control over per channel pushes – for devops shops having bots/automated webhooks/integrations that dump status messages into a channel
@milton.rucks is best able to address these concerns, and I would like to invite you to continue the discussion with him on this thread. Meanwhile, in consideration of your comments @pjv, we have extended the rollout of limits of mobile pushes going through our gateways to December 1, 2020
Thanks again to all, we continue to listen.