Well it ain’t free and unlimited no more.
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It’s open source supposedly and the devs knew that when they offered it as such. So there is no need to feel bad as the platform was advertised as such for a long time and still is as of today on many review sites.
I would be interested and even willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee to cover cost.
Interested and willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee - up to $10/month sounds just fine to me.
Oh my God, they announced a t-shirt contest on the forum, but they didn’t pay attention to an important question (╥_╥)
Take a little time, say something @gabriel.engel
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@RPQ - Please reach out to me
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I don’t have an account on open.rocket.chat - any other way to contact you?
Hi @gabriel.engel do you have any news about this, I think the main focus is that we all agree mantaining the push gateway has costs, and everyone on board to pay for push notifications usage, but we need that option available.
Thank you
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Thank you guys for your feedback.
Anyone operating on-premises deployed servers with less than 5k mobile pushes usage per month will continue to enjoy the use of our push servers indefinitely, as Gabriel Engel has mentioned. This represents, by far, the majority of you.
As active community members, we are hoping that the $5 and $10 a month Github sponsorships are not too much to ask - to cover our operating cost - for those who may be using our push server for up to 15k mobile pushes a month.
You can find Github sponsorship information here. And information on how to apply your sponsorship credits towards your workspace here.
For any non-profit or similar organizations that may be using more than 15k pushes a month, or community users in hardship, we encourage you to reach out to us asap via:
Email : sales@rocket.chat
Or
We are seriously looking at those with more than 15k mobile pushes a month, but still need to use our gateway and for some reason did not subscribe to one of our extended plans. If you can, we also urge you to reach out to us and we can work out something agreeable together.
As for the ability to configure push notification to your specific preference / requirement, it is an issue we have been addressing continuously for the past two years - after Gabriel Engel’s initial message in January 2019. We apologize if the current code does not meet your specific requirements – but we are still listening and will continue to evolve the solution with your support.
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@sing.li really? you come up with another sales pitch and blablabla when it comes to our issues?!
let me tell you how i even came here… i administer (among others) 1 server where i have like 30 users or something. from those maybe 5 or 6 are active, if you so will… and active as in maybe 50 messages per day total.
one day i received a “cold sell email” from a guy called Sergio Ferreira telling me i would use more than 5k notifications per month. I replied to him that i could not believe that and it is totally impossible to have that many notifications/mth with that many users/messages. I never got any reply from him.
then i digged a little deeper and found out that you guys (rocket.chat) just decided to enable all notifications for all users in all channels (!!) via a rocket chat upgrade and didnt even asked to do so.
then it came to me. i have a channel where a twitter news bot is running. this guy sends out quite some messages. however, no-one needs push notifications for those. but as you decided to enable them for all, everywhere, everyone who did not specifically disable those in the web app will still receive notifications.
the kicker is, i as an admin cant even disable that for those users not being active (even logged in) anymore!! the users probably just disabled their notification at an OS level, se they get sent out for nothing anyway.
and then comes that blackmail’ish attempt to force us into paying big money for notifications, which is just shabby, especially after artificially pump up the amount of notifications by forcefully enabling them.
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WHAT?! I don’t have enough words in English to describe your answer. Are you serious now?
No kidding?
The community itself says to you, “WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH 10k/15k/25k MESSAGES!”. We don’t care about additional options from your tariff plans. We only need push-messages!
The idea to do sponsorship via GitHub is great. Only what do you give a maximum of 10k messages? This is not enough.
Scroll to the top of the page, there you will see a lot of solutions to the problem. Which, by the way, you created yourself.
We are ready for a monthly subscription (within reason, not 500$). We are ready to buy packages with messages. But you, the Rocket.Team, probably don’t care about your users.
Well, you tell us to write to sales@rocket.chat.
First: you take a very long time to respond.
Second: why should we write there? What would you again offer us the “PRO” and “ENT” rates? Repeat once again: we don’t need them.
I wonder: meaning of the chat on my server? If the underlying function doesn’t work because of the developers ’ hard-ness? Are you sure you’re open-source?
P.S. guys, pay attention to the fact that we are not answered by the official CEO @gabriel.engel , although we have been calling on him to give an answer for some time. You have a great policy to conduct business (and this is business when you extort money without giving clear answers) Rocket.Team!
P.P.S. Community, maybe I’m wrong about something? You tell me, maybe I’ll change my mind.
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@sleepawalker.white I think that Gabriel did respond (or (had) others in the company (reply) for him). One of those was that hint on the sponsorships and I only just found this post.
In summary, writing as a community member and ‘willing-to-pay’ >15k user, I don’t hold much against RC for going taking path. You could even say that they are vary much softening the blow by announcing it a year in advance and actually having the promised ‘packages’ from back than in place. Using Github is a nice way IMHO, it’s readily accessible for most that way and a clear communication of ‘using open source’ (the right way).
What isn’t right is what Andreas is talking about in his post (just above yours). If those numbers are right something is wrong and a dearly apologetical post and personal mail should be in order.
In terms of pressing - I see multiple RC-members toning down on the ‘forced/upsales ent/pro’, though a sales-rep wouldn’t be worth his wages if he didn’t try to a) understand and b) convince a lead to go for a better package. We can all shout out ‘we wanted free, but willing to pay’ but we should also duly understand that RC wants to understand why we want to host things ourselves (which, in all honesty you’d have to agree, can be far more expensive). Let’s say for some sports team (see other thread) you host RC yourself and have a couple dozen participants - if you get hit by COVID and unfortunately hospitalized, that community is without their precious RC. Suddenly having the cloud-chat available makes sense.
For that same sports team $20(@saas) would still be way to much, and I’m sure the RC-reps wouldn’t try to squeeze there but you never know what special things they are willing to provide and it might be a better deal. Would they still start the conversation hoping to get a 200-person deal at ent? Sure! Wouldn’t you? But if they know the numbers they might be able to create a package that is affordable to the team.
So are you wrong?
- Well, in communication they surely could improve. Still waiting for a date (about 19 days now) so I can turn PNs on again (or have my users live without them).
- In making money, yes, open source isn’t free - even if it is. I’m a small contributor to Home Assistant and as such even got an additional pieace of hardware from a local store to ‘include it’. If I weigh the bought and free product (couple hunderd euros) against the time spend on getting it shared and up to date (even though we’re now a 3 man team), it’s never going to match up. But for me it’s a hobby, I improve my coding skills, and it makes people happy. For RC it’s their bread-and-butter, at some point in time they need to get something out of it
- Are they exaggerating the PN costs? They might, we don’t know (neither should we probably). The proposal made in the other thread about ‘couple of $ per month’ is what they offer through Github. If their top 20% is checkout out at 60k PN/month and they need to support a neatly load-balanced setup of servers, that might cost an additional dev/ops resource just keeping that in check, personnel still is a costly thing (especially if that person can’t work on monetized projects/functionality that enterprise users are paying for to implement).
All in all, would I rather see a free or better way to implement PNs - yes. Am I looking forward to a sales-rep pitch - no, who would? Is Open Source free - no, it never was, nor will be - it’s a way of improving your own code and offer others the ability to chip in. Am I looking, as you, for a decent way to pay for a service someone else is spending money on - you bet, and (keeping in mind Andreas’ story) it should be for the right amount of PNs.
@tom-s What do you want to tell me?
What did Gabriel or someone else say for him somewhere? So we ask you to comment on the situation here.
That the path through GitHub is good? So no one argues. Just at the time of writing the comments (which are above) on the sponsorship page, there was no information from additional push messages, or links to their activation after donation.
You write “we wanted free, but willing to pay”. Find me this message.
No one says that. We all understand what you need to earn and no one condemns it. We are perplexed by the implementation of monetization of the project. It’s bad. And this is being talked about at least since JULY.
You write “For that same sports team 20dollars would still be way to much”. Well, let the sports team not buy, or buy a package for 5dollars. I want to know for sure that if I exceed the message limit, I can change it. Not waiting for the next month or until some Manager responds to me.
You write “need to support a fairly load-balanced setup of servers”. It’s funny, considering that the server performs only one function. Even I, not a system administrator, understand this.
You’ve written a lot of other things, but …
“or have my users live without them” are terrible words that make me lose heart. Because of them, I no longer want to participate in the community.
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@sleepawalker.white don’t overheat things that don’t need cooking - you asked for others opinions, you got my 2 cts. To clarify further, unfortunately again lenghty:
- I’m - like you - a community member, using a (self-)hosted version - so no, I’m not a part of RC
- I’d like to have things for free, but there is no such thing as a free lunch (or … if you ain’t paying you are the product)
- My users like PNs, but if there is no affordable & agreable way, they and me are either loosing out on PNs - or - we need to find another product, which, in time, will be charging for something
- If, instead of just ranting, you’d actually read the topics to which you replied you would know what references I made and that sportsteam got offered something high and - like you and me - just looking for >15k options.
- About wanting free beers, but willing to chip in. Thats a general approach (and thus misconception) with Open Source, just as horsing around authors and contributors into doing what you think is best for them (or rather, for one self). It’s their product and their choosing.
- There is no clarity how to get >15k, like you, me and others, we’d like to see that. The difference between you and me is, I’m (im)patiently waiting for the sales rep. Why? Because they don’t have on display what I’d like.
Going from 6 - If I go to a store that ‘should’ but ‘hasn’t’ got what I desire, I mostly speak to someone in charge if there is a ‘different way’. That might become a special/custom selection or they might find it feasible for all customers, anyway, up to them. Or I take my business elsewhere, that could be the stores loss, or mine. In saying that:
If you add all of those up, RC is - imho and pending a talk - still the best option out there currently. You asked about what others thought, I wrote mine. No reason to flame.
I feel like we’re talking about different things.
Don’t see any point in repeating it and chewing it again.
So here’s the thing with this @sing.li, in your quote above you are obfuscating very specific issues by generalizing them under the blanket of “your specific preference” and “will continue to evolve the solution” as though there are a lot of different issues related to regulating the number of push notifications and that they are all of equal importance and being methodically addressed over time.
That might all make sense under a scenario where you are NOT CHARGING PEOPLE for sending push notifications.
Under the scenario that begins on November 16, where you ARE CHARGING PEOPLE for sending push notifications, there are a couple of very specific requirements that I and others in this thread have mentioned that seem like hard requirements to implement and fully test BEFORE you start charging people and/or cutting off their server’s ability to send push notifications.
To recap, these are:
-
RC should not be sending mobile push notifications for messages that have already been marked as read / seen via web or desktop app. This is a bug that could result in you either cutting people’s push notifications off or charging them for more monthly notifications than they would otherwise need. Fix the bug before implementing the cutoff.
-
There are users who may have set their default notification preferences in RC to send mobile notifications for everything everywhere and then may be managing those notifications at the device level. Or just ignoring notifications they don’t really need. RC admins need to have the ability to override the notification preferences of users on their server. Again, this inability to modify these preferences could cause people to use many more push notifications than they need, so you should fix this before implementing the cutoff.
Not making these changes (so that admins continue not to be able to really control the number of push notifications their servers are using) before implementing the cutoff is an ethically poor choice.
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@RPQ @Andreas @TheUpsideDown
I suggested a solution but the RC team won’t publish the notification key from their Apple developer account. It’s not needed for Android push notification.
It could still be done with an independent Apple developer account, but someone would have to then take responsibility for building the new releases and uploading them to the Google/Apple app stores.
Otherwise I suggest you look at Zulip.
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This is already in the works. Please send an email to this temporary email address so I can get you in touch with that person: leney37874 [at] jah8 [dot] com
@RPQ I sent an email but go no response.
I never received anything. You must have made a mistake. Try this one: chequita [at] jescanned [dot] com
Remember, it’s a temporary email, so if you respond a day or two later then I won’t receive it.
Hey guys,
we’re going to get hit hard by the push limit, and I’m not certain why. I’m suspecting a bug that sends push notifications twice, and made a post about it here -> Push notifications sent twice?! - maybe I could get some help?
We’re a nonprofit community with about 50 active users, and hitting 16000 push notifications with what I think is light to medium usage. The official recommendation for the basic edition is 300 users, which we’re way below.
- we don’t have bots that spam channels
- we only have 2 broadcast channels with medium use
On the other hand… having “General Chat” with 50 users in it will only allow you 300 messages until you hit the global 15k limit for your whole instance.
I mean… 300 messages. In an instant messenger. Most of us have been in IRC channels where this amount is sent within an hour, not a month.