Today is my three-year anniversary as the product leader for Zulip, the organized team chat product. When I left my job as a data science manager at Lyft, the career change felt like an experiment. Now, I’ve been reflecting on why it’s hard to imagine working on anything else. I’ve never had much patience for technology that’s not doing what I need it to do. Confusing interfaces drive me crazy.

This summer, 13 contributors completed the Google Summer of Code(GSoC) program with the Zulip development community. This was the 8th consecutive year that Zulip participated in GSoC; over 100 contributors have now completed one of our formal internship programs, primarily through Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Our welcoming community is fully committed to helping bring up the next generation of open-source contributors from a wide range of backgrounds.

On Friday last week, we announced Zulip 8.0 and some big pricing changes for Zulip’s self-hosted customers. In response to feedback from our user community, today we are adding a new Basic plan for self-hosted Zulip installations. The Basic plan is priced at $3.50/user/month, and includes unlimited access to mobile push notifications. It does not include commercial support, which still requires purchasing a Business or Enterprise plan.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 8.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to solve any challenge. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 7.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to solve any challenge. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

Last week, the open-core team chat platform Mattermost announced that“Mattermost Cloud Free will no longer be offered after July 26, 2023.” This likely came as an unpleasant surprise to users on that plan, as less than a month before, Mattermost’s pricing page featured the promise that the Cloud Free plan would be“free forever”.

As we head into the new year, we want to share some fun facts and highlights from 2022.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 6.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to solve any challenge. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

On July 18, 2022, Slack announced that starting September 1, search history for organizations on Slack’s Free plan will be limited to just the past 90 days of message history. At first blush, this might look like a minor policy tweak. But it is in fact a dramatic change that makes Slack’s free plan untenable for many organizations, including ones that have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years.

Today, we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Zulip’s public access option. Open-source projects and other open communities can now offer one-click access (no login required!) to part or all of their Zulip chat. For those who are not familiar with it, Zulip is a modern team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. It is also a vibrant open-source project, developed by a values-focused organization.