While unfortunate for consumers I get it. Usually consumer customers use more support than business ones while paying significantly less and element still has to make enough money to keep going.
Yeah, I hope Element manages to become sustainable. It feels like they are running out of funding from what they did in the last month.
I don’t see the reason we need a venture capital funded bloated protocol anyways. Just switch to XMPP. It’s much more lightweight and it’s the internet standard for instant messaging.
Let’s clear something up:
- Matrix is a free and open protocol.
- Element is one of several free and open source Matrix clients.
- Vector Limited is a company funding the development of the Element client, that also sells a Matrix homeserver.
- There are several other free and open source Matrix homeservers.
You DO NOT NEED to pay a dime to Vector Limited for a Matrix homeserver, or use the Element client.
Meanwhile, XMPP is a “built by committee” nightmare, with a committee that didn’t commit (pun intended) to basic features, leaving file transfer, audio, or video calls, to be defined as “protocol extensions” (aka: incompatible) by each client.
TL;DR: use Matrix, with the Element client or any other, leave Vector Ltd. for the businesses.
But on the other side, existing customers don’t use much support, once everything is set and working, it’s all profit for them.
Kicking out customers equals to giving up money. I don’t think many of them would start paying double (from $3 per user to $5 per user) or more (you gonna pay for 20 users even if you have 10) instead of just renting a VPS and do it for free
I can assure you existing customers(non business) do still use a disproportionate amount of support. Things like feature requests, lost passwords, new user on boarding, any time anything doesn’t work as the user expects, etc
As for the finances here sure it gives up some income but will also free up a lot of time for someone who is currently doing support so they could focus on other things
