Because Apple and Google use those keys for the apps and determining the push notifications for the appropriate app.
Hi, what happens if we reach the limit, will we be somehow notified? Also is there a way to monitor how much push notifications are sent to the gateway?
what happens if we reach the limit, will we be somehow notified? Also is there a way to monitor how much push notifications are sent to the gateway?
At the minute no, but there will be as and when they get around to implementing this.
Thx for reply. Do You mean no notification that the limit is exceeded or no monitoring of notification number? We use push mostly for alerting so the numbers should not be to high, but i need to know what exactly happens if we reach the limit and how to see if we are close to the limit.
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Nothing has been decided yet, at least officially.
So there is no information on anything. Limits, exceeding limits, monitoring. Nothing.
I think after changing the default to ānotify every messageā they are probably waiting to see the effect.
At the moment it is āwait and seeā
Ok, lets wait, thx for reply!
@gabriel.engel Now that registering the server is up and going and our push notifications are being tracked, we were approached by the sales team on our usage and quoted us an initial price of 54,000 USD based on our usage.
Frankly, how is going from 0 USD a year to over 54K reasonable? The salesman came back with an offer of 37k after we informed them we qualify for a non-profit discount. He said that based on our usage we need the Enterprise license subscription, which includes features we donāt need or want, but only because of the unlimited push notifications.
We self host and manage our own server and have been pleased with Rocket.Chat generally. It was just the solution we needed at the time. We understand and are happy to purchase our share of push notifications, but we do not need enterprise-level features nor is being asked to pay the price of 37,000 USD a year acceptable.
Our organization qualifies to receive an 80% discount on Slack, making the total cost per year lower than Rocket.Chatās ādiscountedā annual cost.
The salesman was very adamant that push notifications could not be purchased a la carte, however from reading this announcement it certainly sounded like it was likely that we could purchase push notification āpackages.ā The salesman said that our push notifications will be cut off in 5 days, causing very big interruptions for our organization with over 1,000 active users.
It seems unreasonable to not allow the purchase of push notifications without purchasing an enterprise license. We are willing to pay for our share of the notification traffic, but this is borderline extortion.
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@minorspew I had the same issue as Iām currently migrating from Matrix to RC. Iāll also include up to 250 members of my (officially approved) non-profit sports club. I also had a chat with a really nice and friendly sales guy, but we have no budget and rely fully on Open Source software.
I finally went the official way which is proposed by the Rocket Chat team to work around the push gateway use: Whitelabelling and build my own mobile apps, so I donāt need to use the RC infrastructure and my server communicates directly with Apple and Google FCM. The doc is pretty good, you need to āplay aroundā with that a bit, but it has cost me only a weekend of figuring out how to do that stuff and a developer membership at Apple and Google.
Started Friday afternoon with setting up the developer environments on an MacOS-VM and Iāve pushed my App to the AppStore and PlayStore this morning. Might be a way to go for you as well.
For a second I had the idea RC could provide the gateway software to run by the community members, but then I understood that this still would need their certificates to be included (here I fully agree with the RC team to not disclose them to the outside world 
)
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Yeah I had considered that but seemed like a lot of work to publish and maintain apps in the app store. Glad you seemed to have a positive experience.
Thank you for the feedback and your continued support for Rocket.Chat, @minorspew!
Your organizationās usage of push notification falls into the 20% of the installed base that is responsible for 80% of total usage on our servers.
And it became part of the very short list that our sales team is currently contacting directly regarding push notification upgrades.
As per my earlier message, we have to do this in order to sustain the 80% of free users that we continue to support. Thank you for your understanding and willingness to contribute.
Typically, our regional sales team is highly sensitive to the localized business environment and any concession status (Education, non-profit, and so onā¦). It appears somehow that this is missed for your particular situation.
Also, we will not cut off your push notifications in the next days. This was a misunderstanding. We will make sure we get in contact with each account admin before taking these actions.
I spoke to our sales team and they should be in touch shortly. Please continue to work with them.
@gabriel.engel @minorspew I guess we were on the edge somewhere with our usage, I finally saw some numbers in the cloud interface and based on that disconnected. Finding this post moments later (earlier today) I see we would have been āup thereā with minorspew and jacotec somewhere. While I do understand the business and opportunities for RC there should still be a middle ground between dozens of semi-private apps in the respective stores and going pro or enterprise. There is literally nothing in there weād be using or interested in - aside from the notifications at some reasonable price-point. But again, itās your business decision and for us to live with, step out or reconsider, from business perspective itās fully understood if you stand by your decision (readily available for over a year so all admins are aware).
@gabriel.engel From my opinion you really should reconsider the planned push notification limiting.
I took it as it is and went the whitelabeling way to work around this issue for my planned RC server and itās use for my non-profit sports club (250 members), where even 10k Pushs will approximately be not enough.
After days of deep learning to build, test and deploy from the whitelabeling sources, I finally got this kind of refuse from Apple:
Guideline 4.3 - Design
We noticed that your app provides the same feature set as other apps submitted to the App Store; it simply varies in content or language, which is considered a form of spam.
The next submission of this app may require a longer review time, and this app will not be eligible for an expedited review until this issue is resolved.
So it seems that the whitelabel route wonāt work in general.
Pushing even more users to do so by implementing the push limits will lead to even more refusals because of similarity to your reference app (or other whitelabels which had the luck to pass at some point before) plus frustrated users.
In addition, they wrote:
Guideline 4.2 - Design - Minimum Functionality
We found that the usefulness of your app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users.
So, 250 initial users seems not to be enough to distribute an own app.
Iād propose, before turning limits on, to give the users the ability to run their own push gateway server. The gateway URL itself is already configurable in the RC server.
As you of course wonāt freely disclose your push certificates that could be a ready compiled docker or VMWare image, so we can be independent from using your gateway resources, but using the Rocket.Chat app as the whitelabeling seems to be a blocked road at Apple.
It is hardly possible to hide the certificates this way. For docker you will always be able to sh into it and for a VMWare image their are also ways, even if the system (/ and boot) is completely encrypted and no tty is spawned.
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@fdellwing At least we need some solution as the whitelabeling way does obviously not work with Apple ā¦ Running own gateways is actually my only good idea here. I donāt know what would be a proper way to not publicy disclose the push certificates, that needs to be answered by the devās who know all the tricks. Any other ideas are highly appreciated.
@jacotec @gabriel.engel @minorspew just looking back at the very first post of this thread ā¦
In the next few weeks, we will start offering a dedicated push notification package for customers who use over 1000 monthly push notifications. We believe that we are offering convenience and good value in exchange for a fair price, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that Rocket.Chat remains available and operational for the community at large.
So I think all thatās unclear is said āpush notifications packageā. I think jacotecās proposal in this or the other thread about a reasonable fee per month/year with a couple dozen users would make sense. Weāre not unwilling to pay, we just want to support and rightfully oblige where due (right?).
I still love the idea of running our own gateways ā¦ and for the certificate thing there are ways, Iām sure ā¦ Yes, you can SSH into a docker container, but when an already compiled app is running there (no clear text python or php code etc.) and the certs are somewhere inside it, maybe encrypted, I think this will be safe.
We have written our own push notification gateway in C++ and did not have any issue with a white labelled ReactNative app at Apple or Google App Store yet (except nasty questions about abuse handling). Our modification includes onboarding with a dedicated oAuth2 service (still allowing to add more RC server accounts), maybe this was āsufficientā to count as a different app.
@rasos if youāre in youāll most likely stay in, but having a well priced ājust notificationsā packages (by which we also support RC) or some way like @jacotec described sounds like a better way to go.
@gabriel.engel any chance RC is able to answer? I briefly chatted with Luis who would get back to my mail (either by chat or reply) but having some options besides going āfull pro/enterpriseā would be appreciated (or a reasonably vague ETA on such plans)
Thanks, @tom-s
We really appreciate your understanding.
Let me assure you that we have no intention to squeeze out community users or force upgrades to pro or enterprise products. If that is the message that has been conveyed, let me apologize on our sales teamās behalf.
I have spoken to our sales representatives in your region to correct the situation. Please reconnect with them at your convenience.
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Hi there!
Just wanted to echo what has already been said by others: as a small non-profit organisation, we are currently feeling uncertain on how to proceed with rocket.chat. We are a small musics society empowering young people to play an instrument and make music, and weāre mostly using rocket.chat for the planning and organisation of our events.
As a non-profit, the current pricing models are waaay beyond what we can afford. I think at best, the maximum amount we could afford to pay is $5/month. I know sounds ridiculous but thatās how much we can pay given our small budget and given weāre trying to spend every penny we have on our projects and helping disadvantaged children.
When we decided that we needed a team chat, we explicitly decided to go against Slack, as we thought itād be nice to have something we own ourselves and also think about privacy & data protection etc. Now it looks as if this is coming to bite us in the as, and weāre thinking about moving back to Slack. Weāre below 5k/month at the moment, but I suspect this will change soon as we start using the app more extensively.
Long story short: weāre stuck and looking for a way out.
- At first I thought, I could try to go through the nightmare of compiling the app myself, and then that would work. Having had a look at @jacotecās post from above, it looks as if this would leave us without a working client for iOS users, which isnāt good.
- Any chance you could give us guidance on how to get the compiled app accepted on the App Store? If this doesnāt work, then apparently whitelabelling isnāt a solution at all for small organisations?
- Alternatively, would it be possible to do some kind of co-hosting scheme? Most users are Android users, only very few are using iOS. So Iām thinking if we could self-compile the Android app, as this one perhaps seems easier to get uploaded to the Google Play Store, while sticking with your iOS App?
- All Iāve read is that thereās the option of increasing the number of push notifications to 10k for something like $30/per/month ā which seems way beyond what we can afford, plus isnāt actually that much more? Apart from the steep pricing model, I was wondering if it might just be possible to purchase a simple one-off package of x amount of push notifications to be used up within one month or so. Or some pay-as-you-go scheme, like I have on my mobile phone contract.
- Generally speaking, I really appreciate that you need to make some profits for running operating your services (and I really hope that you do because itās a service worth maintaining!) but the amounts that weāre talking about here are just absolutely way too much even when including a non-profit discount. I mean, just for reference: $50,000k is probably our annual overall budget for the entire organisation. No way we could spend anything even close to that amount on push notifications! Our tech cost is at about $15/month, so would have expected the extra cost for push notifications to be somewhat below that.
Anyway, as somebody else already said: I know you owe us nothing. But itād be so brilliant if a way could be found for really small entities like us to make use of your amazing software without us going bankrupt. 
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