Zulip

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. If you’ve been using Zulip, love the product and its innovative threading model, and want to help share it with the world, please consider supporting us.

An important part of Zulip’s mission is ensuring that worthy organizations, from programming-language developers to research communities, are able to use Zulip whether or not they have funding.  For this reason, we sponsor Zulip Cloud Standard hosting for open source projects, non-profits, education, and academic research. This program has grown exponentially since its inception; today we are proud to fully sponsor Zulip hosting for several hundred organizations. Support from the community will help us continue to afford these programs as their popularity grows.

Zulip is built by an incredible distributed community of developers from all around the world. Guiding that community in developing a world-class team chat product with apps for every major desktop and mobile platform requires leadership from a talented, dedicated team. The only sustainable model is for our core team to be compensated fairly for their time, not burned out because they are effectively working two full-time jobs.

To fund Zulip, we have created a mission-driven for-profit company, Kandra Labs. Incorporating as a business rather than a non-profit helps us attract top talent by offering a stake in the company, so that employees can benefit if Zulip is highly successful. It also makes us eligible for innovation grants from the US National Science Foundation, which have been an important part of funding Zulip.

Meanwhile, we have purposefully chosen not to take venture capital funding. This choice allows us to live by our values, without investor pressure to compromise them when doing so might be "good business" or "what everyone does".

To learn more about some of the principle-based choices we make day after day, check out our blog post! And please consider promoting Zulip and other free and open-source applications in your community, at your job, and on social media. We greatly appreciate your support!