[pcthrowaway]

> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel

Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway

[esperent]

When hosting and using their free notifications service, you're basically using their test server with no uptime guarantees. I agree that there's only so much you can expect from a free service, but unreliable notifications make a chat app 100% useless for any serious work.

If you pay, it's $10/user/month for the basic service. Where I live that's about 3x Ms Teams, 2x Slack. And you still have to self host.

Self hosting the service has the same issue as Rocketchat: you need an Apple dev account, a firebase account and an endless amount of free time. It's going to be far harder and more time consuming than just hosting the app.

[pcthrowaway]

We haven't had any issues with the free notification service. They did release the code to host your own but I think you'd also have to rebuild and release their mobile app to use it, and that sounds like a massive hassle.

I'm using it for a nonprofit, so $10/month per user is out of the question. Self-hosting and open source are critical to us also.