Regarding risk: I certainly won't blame you for feeling risk-averse given the history of the tech industry. I can tell you about some unusual choices we've intentionally made to minimize risk for our users:

- We eschewed VC funding. A big part of my motivation was that I felt that VC funding usually requires eventual enshittification. https://zulip.com/values/ talks more about this.

- Zulip has been 100% FOSS software for more than a decade.

- At the very beginning, we built a complete data import/export system that allows migrating between our Cloud hosting and self-hosting; we put a lot of care into maintaining it well.

I can't promise that we'll never have something to sell for self-hosting communities. For example, I could imagine offering a paid add-on for encrypted backups.

That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.

Thanks for the response. I'll discuss it w/ my users.

> That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.

I think you touched on the sort of thing I'm concerned about with your mention of enshittification, though I think you're probably right that VC funding is involved in most cases. It is good to know that you've been at it for a decade and have (apparently) built a sustainable business selling a product people like.

My concerns (which I hope are understandable) aside, I certainly support your right to charge money for what you've made, as I said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953048).

>Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp.

Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?

IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.