Handling of push notifications

Community Support
1

I would like to address the whole topic of the enforcement and the implementation of push notifications in RC.

We, a mid sized German university, are happily using rocket.chat on premise on our own infrastructure. Currently we are serving round about 10.000 users in our main chat, working flawlessly.

Then RC introduced the limitiation of those push notifications. To be clear, as we are used to work with open source projects we are always happy to give somthing back and get things going. So despite the price only for pushes is quite a stance (see this thread about the pricing How to buy push notifications?!) we entered the negotiations to get a licence for an educational licence which includes unlimited notifications. We are acknowledging the fact, that this is actual a cross financing for the whole project, but which was never said :wink:

Then, during our negotiation, the limit was inforced. We disabled push for our users, as we expierienced for EVERY single failed notification our logs filled up with:

I20201210-18:04:31.260(0) server.js:204 Push âž” error Error sending push to gateway (5 try) -> Error: failed [429] {"code":131,"error":"the amount of push notifications allowed for the workspace was used","requestId":"86759b8a-c7a0-4291-b183-cd6231e2d451","status":429}  [....]

Which nearly brought our servers down…

This morning, the RC Bot informed us 134 times, that

 “Attention You have reached your monthly mobile push limit. Check push usage for more details.”

Nice one, we disabled that! So all the admin users had to click that blue banner at the top exactly 134 times… and set the channel of rocket.cat as read…at least that worked! Note again: We disabled push!

To be clear: This is not the way to handle such things! If you want to get revenue out of your product, treat your potential customers good, do not bug them, package bundles which are affordable! For the price offered it would be cheaper to send those pushes out via SMS! We are happy to invest in OSS and projects but it has to work! And for all the little and small users and enterprises out there: You are pushing your user base out! This is dangerous stuff for an OSS project!

Sending this via mail to our contact at RC as well!

3 Likes
2

:crossed_fingers:

We’re only on 33 users and our setup apparently puts us in the “Enterprise” tier, designed for “businesses needing high-level scalability”!

I get the impression from the lack of clarity, understanding, and support around this issue, that the RC team are looking at Slack and being blinded by the dollars in their eyes. It seems as though their understanding of notification usage fails to consider that 80% of their install base either don’t use push notifications, or are inactive/test/experimental installations. I say that on the basis that ours is used by a small bunch of friends and we’ve had 40-52k notifications/month for the past 3 months. RC team: if you’re going to use your usage statistics in your pricing strategy you need to remove the outliers.

It’s crazy. If RC don’t provide a solution in the next couple of days they’ll lose us as a potential customer because I’ll be looking into the custom app builds route. Neither Google nor Apple charge extra for push notifications. If I do end up taking that route I’ll, at the very least, publish a step-by-step guide to doing so.

Again I must stress, we’re more than happy to pay a reasonable price for additional notifications (we don’t need any other extras listed on the pricing plans). We’re still hanging on as a potential customer, but RC need to be realistic here and take into account the fact we’re literally just a group of mates keeping in touch - there’s no enterprise thing going on here, no business, no organisations involved. If it’s not affordable we’ll need to find an alternative solution.

2 Likes
3

We are not even using RocketChat’s gateway and got this this overnight:

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image1024Ă—1135 248 KB

I mean WTH guys! Why would we get RC push limit notifications when we don’t even use that gateway?

4

RC is basically blowing up their own customer base. Which is what I predicted months ago and it’s why I looked for alternatives.

Contact me if you are interested in an alternative and affordable push notifications gateway.

5

I too do not use the rocket gateway as I developed my own and branded app because if the limits being imposed. I too received 105 messages this morning in two different rocket server instances that I exceeded the push limit that I am not using!
If anyone wants affordable simple priced pushes send me a PM.
RPQ will hopefully speak for me to that effect.

6

I literally have just set this up and registered my workspace. I am the only user on the server and had 0 push usage. but the rocket.cat sent 178 similar push notifications when I literally had caused 0 myself.

7

Please see the announcement for more details. Unfortunately a bug while trying to inform those few that had hit the limit and it reached others. :frowning:

8

Hi @aaron.ogle, how do we purchase reasonable additional push notifications at a reasonable price?

9

I believe info about currently available plans is there in the announcement about the limit going enforced. Also please feel free to contact sales as they also have information about options available.

If you have any technical questions feel free to ask and I can help with those :slight_smile:

10

Please see: How to buy push notifications?!

If you can’t help, could you please ask someone who can to have a look and get in touch please. I did contact support nearly a week ago and I contacted sales yesterday. We have 33 users, a bunch of mates talking about beer and tech, and we aren’t ridiculously active, but we get through 40-52k notifications currently. Your pricing plans (pro, at least), would work out at $2,400 USD/year. That’s extreme for a bunch of mates keeping in touch.

11

If you can send me in a message the email to contact you at I can forward to sales and ask them to take a look.

Also no need to report my message. I’m not in sales, or involved in the actual sales process. The plans shared are the same ones i’m aware of. Github sponsorship offers some increases and you can redeem the increase of push via: https://sponsorship.rocket.chat

I understand might not be enough, if not sales would be your best bet.

Thanks,

12

RC is basically blowing up their own customer base. Which is what I predicted months ago and it’s why I looked for alternatives.

13

Still waiting for someone to recommend me the alternatives.

14

I actually am interested in this! Tell me!