Does Zulip scale to a large number of users?

Yes! Some of our biggest fans have 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 a large Zulip in action, the Zulip community server has thousands of accounts and hundreds of weekly active users, and is run on a single machine with 8GB of RAM.

If I start out on the Zulip hosted cloud service, can I later switch to running my own server?

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 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 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 non-salaried participants 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 Zulip for open source projects or Zulip for working groups and other part-time communities.