That's a huge friends group! :)

You don't need to email the sales team unless you have questions about the policy. It should be clear that "groups of friends" are eligible from the text you quoted.

You just need to spend 2 minutes filling out a brief form that's integrated in the server setup process if/when you have more than 10 users on your server. We enjoy hearing the brief notes users provide about how they are using Zulip. Is that too much to ask in exchange for reliably delivering you a service that you use every day?

It takes quite a bit longer to install a self-hosted server or configure an organization for thousands of users than to fill out the form -- I'd expect most people to spend more than 2 minutes creating a VM before they even get to running the installer. I'd expect that nicely configuring a Discord server for 2K people takes hours.

Is there something that we could change in the website that would make it obvious this is not an onerous process? The purpose of the section is to make clear that self-hosting Zulip is free for this sort of non-incorporated community use ... but we do need to have some eligibility process where you describe what you are, or it's free for Amazon too.