With the cost reasoning out of the way, then it's a matter of choosing which alternative to use. Any other scenario and we have to analyze it differently. There are also many other alternatives that you may want to try.įor the sake of this article, let's assume you're a small to medium company, in need of private rooms, many external users (for example, your clients), with at least 50 people. For example, if you're an open source community, you would try Gitter instead. For most companies, the conversation history is not so important and even the free-tier will be more than enough.Ĭost is less relevant depending on your context, and there are many different uses for group chats. That's 12 times cheaper.Īgain, you shouldn't do it just for the cost savings as the maintenance burden can easily not be worth it if you or your team are not devops savvy and you don't have anyone to keep monitoring it.
CHEAPEST ROCKETCHAT DEPLOYMENT PLUS
You avoid paying around USD 12,000 a year or more, and instead you will pay USD 960 a year in Digital Ocean boxes and MMS plus a few hours every month in basic maintenance. What I will argue is that if you have 150 people or more, and you're still growing, it's not such a big burden to jump into your own infrastructure. Of course, it costs some work and maintenance, so it's not for everybody. If you're a medium to big company it really starts to make sense to want to have more control over your own property. If you're from outside of the US coastal cities, specially from countries in South America, Asia where currency can be more than 3 times devalued, than it quickly starts to become a big deal.Īpart from that, we are currently offloading a whole lot of out IPs and knowledge into the care of companies we don't really know and where we don't hold any real stakes. On my GitLab cost calculations, some people argued that saving USD 15k yearly is not such a big deal, and they're not wrong. If you have more than 20 people then it starts to become a conundrum. If you're a small team (around a dozen people) it's well worth it and you should definitely pay and get over with. But then you have to commit to pay USD 8/month per user (USD 6.67 if you pay ahead of time).