That's smart - I know I've had a couple of folks interested enough to download the app, but not interested enough to use it on a daily basis.
If I may, I'd like to push a little deeper on this. Why the single-digit user limit at that price? Doubling or quadrupling the users, or halving the price, would make it a no-brainer of an option to point people to if they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up their own server. As it stands, the pricing feels restrictive to the point where I would feel punished for growing my server (I'd instead tell someone to get their own matrix.org address, at which point it sounds like we could just use Discord/Signal/Slack?). The extra financial burden (these are my family and friends, so I would never ask them to chip in) would actually incentivize me to keep my server as small as possible, which is the antithesis of what the goal of a hosted service should be.
As I write this, I'm realizing that there's no real utility here for anyone technical enough to warm to Matrix/Element's strengths. We can talk about the everyman who's not on HN all we want, but my hunch is that those people would rather just use Signal or Discord based on their use-case - no confusing concepts like "homeservers" and "federation". With a user limit and the current pricing model, every use-case (from a short tryout to a long-term personal homserver) is better served either by the free matrix.org model or by a self-hosted solution.
If I may, I'd like to push a little deeper on this. Why the single-digit user limit at that price? Doubling or quadrupling the users, or halving the price, would make it a no-brainer of an option to point people to if they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up their own server. As it stands, the pricing feels restrictive to the point where I would feel punished for growing my server (I'd instead tell someone to get their own matrix.org address, at which point it sounds like we could just use Discord/Signal/Slack?). The extra financial burden (these are my family and friends, so I would never ask them to chip in) would actually incentivize me to keep my server as small as possible, which is the antithesis of what the goal of a hosted service should be.
As I write this, I'm realizing that there's no real utility here for anyone technical enough to warm to Matrix/Element's strengths. We can talk about the everyman who's not on HN all we want, but my hunch is that those people would rather just use Signal or Discord based on their use-case - no confusing concepts like "homeservers" and "federation". With a user limit and the current pricing model, every use-case (from a short tryout to a long-term personal homserver) is better served either by the free matrix.org model or by a self-hosted solution.