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Why it’s listed

Since May 2026 the company behind it, Kandra Labs, is fully owned by the nonprofit Zulip Foundation, with no outside investors1,2. The self-hosted version has every feature of the cloud one and is Apache-2.01,3. Hosting is sponsored free for open-source projects, research, education and non-profits1.

The trade-off

Founder Tim Abbott and three senior team members stepped back in May 2026 to join Anthropic; he stays on the foundation board2. The free cloud plan searches the last 10,000 messages4.

Price

Free self-hosted; Cloud Standard $6.67 per user a month billed yearly4.

Sources

  1. zulip.com/values
  2. blog.zulip.com/2026/05/15/announcing-zulip-foundation
  3. github.com/zulip/zulip
  4. zulip.com/plans

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