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Mattermost Cloud Free will no longer be offered after July 26, 2023

22 points by alhirzel ↗ HN
I just received the following email from Mattermost:

Mattermost Cloud Free will no longer be offered after July 26, 2023.

Mattermost’s Cloud Free plan will be discontinued for new and existing Cloud workspaces. This includes your workspace.

We can imagine that this requires some transitioning for your organization, so we’re offering support for 90 days before deprecating Cloud Free.

Why is Cloud Free going away?

Mattermost is focused on providing the leading secure collaboration platform for technical and operational teams. To achieve this, we are committed to focusing on customer needs, and correlating our product direction and investments to where customers derive the most value from our offerings, which typically occurs through self-hosted deployments or via our secure Professional and Enterprise Cloud offerings. This means continued investment in providing customers with the essential product features, integrations and security infrastructure needed to meet the demands of technical and operational teams.

Is Mattermost going away?

Absolutely not! We’re committed to supporting technical and operational teams to collaborate better. Only the Free version of Cloud is being deprecated. For organizations that do not currently need features from Professional and Enterprise plans, Mattermost can be easily hosted on public cloud via Bitnami.

What are my options?

* Upgrade to a Professional or Enterprise plan. If Mattermost is a critical tool for your organization, we recommend upgrading. Additional features will be available, including administration and user management, security features, and more.

* Host Mattermost on your own infrastructure. Did you know you can host Mattermost on your own server? Thousands of organizations self-host Mattermost for increased control, to meet nation-state level security requirements and more. Here’s a guide to move your data from Cloud → self-hosted.

* Host Mattermost on a public cloud. If your organization still wishes to host Mattermost on cloud and upgrading is currently not right for you, you can deploy Mattermost on AWS Cloud, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

Please reach out to us at https://mattermost.com/contact-sales/ if you have any questions on these options.

Thank you, The Mattermost Team

6 comments

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Enderboi
Phew.

I'm happy they're just discontinue the free Cloud version, rathert than changing the licensing for On-Prem :)

... better than Atlassian!

TheNewsIsHere
I am on a Cloud Free plan that was grandfathered from the paid “Cloud Starter,” which I was only able to pay for partially once, before they made it thie Cloud Freetier with its existing features as a “thank you”. I sent the CEO feedback at the time saying I’d wish they’d let me pay for it because free wouldn’t be sustainable with the way they built the cloud service. I didn’t want something that important for free anyway, and self-hosting it had become annoying (although quite easy).

This isn’t exactly how I meant that. On the whole, not a great customer experience. It makes me think they haven’t been making plans with a view toward long term stability. “Just copying Slack”. I’ll probably pay for Pro in the cloud even though I can self-host for cheaper.

prepend
I understand companies want to make money but there’s got to be a way to make cloud services so cheap to operate that free tiers are possible. I’m thinking about how cheap IRC is to run, that companies don’t care.

Theoretically, there should be ways to design software that the marginal cost to support a user is incredibly small. The issue is that there’s no money in that so open source groups who pivot to companies move away from this model to make money. And of course, I’m not willing to do it. So I just sort of lament and am great full that gnu coreutils isn’t trying to sell me some 4 hour workweek inspired $8/month plan via a stupid blog post describing the millions in value created from running ls and cd.

codegeek
"Why is Cloud Free going away?"

Then a bunch of word salad. Why can't companies just be honest and say "We cannot afford to offer a free plan anymore" and just be done with it. Nothing wrong with it. Business has to make money. But please just be straight.