Does Zulip scale to a large number of users?

Yes! Zulip's unique threading is amazing for large, busy communities. Some of our biggest fans are organizations use Zulip with hundreds or thousands of users, including Fortune 500 companies like Akamai and open source communities like The Recurse Center. If you'd like to see what Zulip looks like in action in a larger community, our own Zulip development community is open to the public and has several thousand user accounts and hundreds of weekly active users.

If I start out on the Zulip hosted cloud service, and a few years down the line want to move to running my own server, can I later export my data?

Yes! Zulip supports exporting your organization's data and then importing it into another Zulip server.

Can I use your free hosting service just to hang out with a few dozen of my friends?

Yes! Our "non-commercial use with less than 100 users" offering is for you in addition to non-profits and other worthy causes!

My organization isn't obviously eligible for your free hosting plan, but we have a lot of non-employee users and can't afford to pay for all of them. Do you offer discounts for this sort of situation?

Yes! Our pricing is designed to be affordable for companies that are paying their users a salary. If your organization is an educational institution or otherwise has a lot of participants who you aren't paying a salary, we can likely offer your organization free or highly discounted hosting. Contact us with your organization's story and we'd be happy to discuss. You may also be interested in our resources on Zulip for open source projects and Zulip for part-time communities.