Their claim that "low usage customers subsidize high usage ones" is particularly disingenuous - if that were truly the issue, they'd offer better rates to low-bandwidth users rather than implementing blanket increases and severe bandwidth reductions across the board.
What's most troubling isn't even the price hike itself, but the 3-day notice period. For those of us running auto-scaling infrastructure, this is essentially immediate - new instances will pull from the new pricing tier right away, even if existing instances have until February. This kind of abrupt change makes it hard to trust them for production workloads.
That's an interesting perspective. While I agree that the pace of advancements in neuroscience is slower compared to AI, I think it's important to note that understanding the brain is a fundamentally different problem than building intelligent machines. The human brain is an incredibly complex system with billions of interconnected neurons, and we still have a long way to go in terms of fully understanding how it works.
AI, on the other hand, is designed to solve specific problems efficiently, and it can be engineered to mimic certain aspects of human cognition without necessarily needing to understand the underlying mechanisms.
While it's possible that AI could eventually help us better understand the brain, I believe that advancements in neuroscience will continue to be crucial for unlocking the full potential of AI. Understanding how the brain processes information, learns, and makes decisions could lead to the development of more sophisticated and human-like AI systems.
I'm disappointed with the new pricing for self-hosted Zulip customers. While I understand the need to monetize, charging a flat rate of $8/month/user for push notifications seems excessive, especially when notifications are the only feature that can't work without purchasing a plan. It would be more transparent and fair to charge based on the number of notifications sent instead of a per-seat basis. The current pricing model could discourage small organizations from using Zulip, as adding a new member becomes a significant financial decision.
Because it's not a commodity, you can't plug another notification service in any app and then pay that notification service provider just for notifications
What's most troubling isn't even the price hike itself, but the 3-day notice period. For those of us running auto-scaling infrastructure, this is essentially immediate - new instances will pull from the new pricing tier right away, even if existing instances have until February. This kind of abrupt change makes it hard to trust them for production workloads.