Introducing the Starter plan — free access to premium features for limited-scale use

Announcements
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In the last few years, we’ve seen Rocket.Chat grow into a fully-featured, extensible, secure and compliant collaboration platform used by many of the world’s most regulated and security-conscious industries.

During this time, we have added a wide range of premium capabilities that help organizations work more efficiently, communicate with their customers effectively, and extend Rocket.Chat intelligently.

This week we’re excited to launch the new plans and pricing announced last summer, designed to ensure that all organizations, from small teams to large enterprises, can experience the benefits of Rocket.Chat’s premium capabilities.

With the release Rocket.Chat v6.5, we’re proud to introduce the brand new Starter plan

The Starter plan ensures that those operating small environments have free and forever access to nearly everything Rocket.Chat has to offer.

The new Starter plan is availaable for self-managed deployments and it includes:

  • Up to 25 users
  • Up to 100 monthly active contacts (omnichannel)
  • Nearly all premium capabilities, including read receipts and multiple omnichannel queues
  • Unlimited push notifications
  • Unlimited apps
  • All channels integrations, including WhatsApp (omnichannel)
  • Full Matrix federation
  • Advanced user data sync

If you exceed the scalability limits of the Starter plan or are updating a Community workspace that already has more than 25 users or 100 monthly active contacts (MACs), your workspace will automatically be provisioned a 30-day trial for the premium plan that best supports your usage. During this trial period, you have the option to upgrade to one of our paid plans (Pro or Enterprise), reduce your number of users to align with the Starter scalability limits, or easily switch back to the Community.

Compare the benefits of the Starter against the Community

We’re also introducing the new Pro plan, an accessible option for scaling workspaces.

The Pro plan provides a new paid option (at a lower price point and with added flexibility) for organizations that wish to continue using premium capabilities at scale.

It includes everything in the Starter plan, plus:

  • Up to 500 users (team collaboration)
  • Removable watermark
  • Advanced LDAP, SAML and Oauth capabilities
  • Standard support

You also have the flexibility to add-on:

  • Standard cloud hosting
  • Up to 15,000 monthly active contacts (omnichannel’s MAC) — purchased in packs of 3,000

The Pro plan can be purchased via self-service within your Rocket.Chat cloud portal or you can contact sales for help.

It is also important to highlight that our commitment to offering free open source options remains unwavering. For organizations that do not find value in our premium capabilities, Community option will always be available; if you choose to go that route.

Update to the latest version of Rocket.Chat

In addition to releasing v6.5, we are extending the deprecation date for an additional two weeks to for accessing our cloud services (marketplace apps, push notification and omnichannel gateway), mobile and desktop apps for unsupported Rocket.Chat versions.

All Community workspaces running an outdated version of Rocket.Chat will have this additional two weeks until December 15, 2023 to evaluate the new plans and update to a supported version of Rocket.Chat. To know which versions are currently supported, please refer to our version durability document.

Already running a workspace? Update

Looking to get started? Install

3 Likes
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This pricing is just bizarre 4$/user/month makes sense if you were hosting it. But for the likes of self hosted instances/air-gapped instances is insane.

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A couple of thoughts on this:

  1. I learned about this change after receiving an email today stating that I’d been signed up for a “free trial” of Pro, since my server technically has over 25 users. The email did not explain that the number of users had anything to do with this, nor did it mention the new Starter plan or link to the actual announcement for context. As such, you basically used this launch as an opportunity to try and upsell your Community servers with more than 25 users to Pro.

    This was clearly a marketing action, and I do not appreciate that you sent that email out to users who’d unsubscribed from your marketing emails (pretending that this was “transactional”), nor do I appreciate that you signed me up for a Pro trial (which would affect the features my users see available) without my consent as the administrator.

    In addition to using this as an excuse to send nonconsensual advertising to administrators, it partially seems like you bypassed administrators in the hopes that their users would like some of the Pro features and complain to their administrators when the trial expires, which seems hostile to administrators.

  2. My server technically has 32 users, 28 of which are currently taking up seats (e.g. not disabled). The number of users who have actually logged in in the past year is around 2. The maximum number who have ever been active at the same time is about 15. If you’re going to try and upsell random tiny Community servers like mine, then you should consider implementing some kind of heuristic for chargeable users that takes into account how recently a user’s logged in, not just whether they’re active with the ability to log in.

    Aside from this Rocket.Chat server (which I use for internal planning and discussion for my own side business), I help manage a public, 10,000-plus-user Mattermost server for my day job that probably only has less than 100 users sending messages per day. Any organization is going to consider user-based (or user-limited) pricing a non-starter if they want the server to be open to infrequent users and don’t want to constantly purge inactive accounts (creating friction for returning users) just to try and keep the number of seats from inflating rapidly beyond the actual requirements.

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@jacobgkau - Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback. A few points below:

  1. We’ve been communicating two important changes since July. First, that we’ll require organizations to be running a supported version of Rocket.Chat to connect to our cloud services or use our mobile app builds. Second, that we’re taking the big step of providing virtually all of our premium features in a free limited-use Starter Plan. If you don’t want the Starter plan, that’s totally cool with us, just remove it and you’re running Community Edition. If you don’t want to update your workspace that is also okay - you’ll just need to handle your own cloud service functionality and manage your own mobile builds.

  2. For workspaces that are continuing to use our cloud services and mobile apps past the deprecation date we are informing both admins and users that access to those services will terminate shortly if the workspaces are not kept current. As a reminder we’ve moved back the enforcement date several times and December 15th is now that critical date.

  3. In regards to the usage limit for Starter plan. The current limit makes all premium features available for a large percentage of workspaces. This is what we can do and we’re glad that we’re able to. Beyond the established limits we can’t offer premium features for free without impacting the health of our open source community … and we are committed to making sure that the community version is available to organizations like yours.

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Christopher, my server’s already up-to-date, so your first two points are basically not relevant at all. I’m not sure if you were trying for some misdirection thing there or if you just didn’t comprehend my message.

My issue is not with the Starter plan’s existence, or with the lack of Pro features in the free Community edition. The comments about your payment scheme being impractical for several entire classes of usage were just some passing feedback.

My actual issue is that you started a free trial of Pro on my server, enabling additional features that will become disabled again unless I pay, without my permission; and then you sent me an unsolicited email “notification” about this advertising for your Pro plan, even though I’m not subscribed to your marketing emails.

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I don’t do misdirection and I do comprehend :wink: The notification about the trial is indeed a platform notification email. I’ll pass along your feedback to the team who will handle responses to your posts in the future. Feel free to reach out to me on our Open server if you’d like to discuss further.

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This. Just a bizarre price plan. People just wanted read receipts for an reasonable price. They didn’t get it.

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Hitting me with a smug winking emoji, real classy and professional, I see.

“I’ll pass along your feedback to the team who will handle responses to your posts in the future.” What does this even mean? You’re passing me as an individual off to some other team to “handle responses to my posts?” Is that some kind of euphemism for a shadow-ban?

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Counting Users based on recent activity is a good idea, but if it’s too much to ask, at least consider counting only Enabled users

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Hi Jacob - we do have community guidelines for a reason and we do consider ourselves to be a community. Please review them. As noted, I’m available to discuss via Open as needed but am not always available for a full discussion via forum and other help to make sure that we are responsive. I can be reached as christopher.skelly on Open as needed.

We’re happy about the take-up on Starter plan so far and are pleased that we have thousands of workspaces using the plan so far. If you don’t want to use the plan or the Pro trial then simply remove them and you’re good to go.

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I only register new here as I face same problem as @jacobgkau
There are still no answers to his good question.
This upvoted Github comment has same objections.

Community needs clear public answers from Rocket.Chat team asap, please.

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We are using rocket.chat for many years because we needed an internally running, “air-gapped” reliable chat-tool with basic functions. Our experience was good, but there have been some major issues.
This marketing behaviour to upgrade our installation without our permission is another major issue which may lead us to finally change to another chat-tool!
When intruducing payed plans, the customer communication has already been very bad. Rocketchat just stopped to send push-notifications and provided no acceptable plan for us (50 users) so we had to look for another provider who could send us rocketchat-notofications. Another issue was the bug with automatic updates of the client-software on Windows which hasn’t been fixed for years! Even in the payed plans!
So what can we expect for the future?
Our users have been asking to change the chat-tool / chat-service for years and is was me who wanted to stay with rocketchat. Now I’m planning to change. Don’t like how a company destroyes the reputation of a great software.

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Again, I have to protest this price policy. If you have 28 users and only want read receipts, you have to pay 1400€ per year. With a self hosted instance! That is madness. Can some body explain the reasoning behind this? I mean, if I had to pay the difference between starter and professional (in my case: 3 users) that would be fair. But so: way to expensive.

1 Like
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Hi,

I’m very confused: my self-managed, self-hosted instance of Rocket Chat tells me that “Your workspace exceeded the seats license limit. Manage your subscription to increase limits.” How is that possible? I specifically chose Rocket Chat to be open-source, free, and independent of corporate interference (in opposition to Slack, for example). Please help me understand what’s happening and how I can free my workspace?

Best,
Yann

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I’m considering using rocketchat in PRO plan, but I haven’t found information on the site about the additional packages of monthly active contacts (MAC), what is the price? by the way, those 100 MAC are per user? or for the whole organization.

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My issue is not with the Starter plan’s existence, or with the lack of Pro features in the free Community edition. The comments about your payment scheme being impractical for several entire classes of usage were just some passing feedback.