But for what it's worth, we're including support with Zulip Business, not consulting. Consulting is building custom features or whatnot that are just for a single customer.
Support is a guarantee that when you have a problem, you can ask for help and a human will investigate it and get back to you with what to do. It sounds like you've already received free support from us in the past.
Most of the issues that one helps a customer with in a support context are not unique to the customer -- but the support is still essential for the customer to actually have their problem solved, and investigating, debugging, and deduplicating reported issues responsively is effectively support work done by our (small!) team of people who need to make a living.
As noted in our email to customers, if you are seriously considering leaving Zulip because of this pricing, we'd like to hear from you. This pricing is intended to be very affordable as a cost for team chat for a business using it for their paid team, and the full price is intended primarily for that class of customer.
But without context on how you're using Zulip, I can't comment on whether your organization would be eligible for a discount or our community plan, but see https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted for several documented situations where an installation would not pay full price.
But for what it's worth, we're including support with Zulip Business, not consulting. Consulting is building custom features or whatnot that are just for a single customer.
Support is a guarantee that when you have a problem, you can ask for help and a human will investigate it and get back to you with what to do. It sounds like you've already received free support from us in the past.
Most of the issues that one helps a customer with in a support context are not unique to the customer -- but the support is still essential for the customer to actually have their problem solved, and investigating, debugging, and deduplicating reported issues responsively is effectively support work done by our (small!) team of people who need to make a living.
As noted in our email to customers, if you are seriously considering leaving Zulip because of this pricing, we'd like to hear from you. This pricing is intended to be very affordable as a cost for team chat for a business using it for their paid team, and the full price is intended primarily for that class of customer.
But without context on how you're using Zulip, I can't comment on whether your organization would be eligible for a discount or our community plan, but see https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted for several documented situations where an installation would not pay full price.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799 may also provide some useful context.