As we head into the new year, we want to share some fun facts and highlights from 2024.

A year ago, I figured out a better way to manage new contributors who are failing to follow the guidelines for the Zulip open-source community, and enjoy it more. Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work, with conversations organized by topic. It has a vibrant contributor community, and new folks join all the time, especially in the months leading up to applications for the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy mentorship programs.

I’m very happy to announce the general beta release of Zulip’s next-generation mobile app for Android and iOS! For over a year, we’ve been rebuilding mobile Zulip from scratch atop a new technical foundation powered by Flutter. The new app offers a sleek new design and a faster, smoother experience than the old app built on React Native. For those of you just tuning in: Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work.

Are you looking for a team chat app for your business? Perhaps your tools aren’t scaling well as your organization grows, or you’re early in your journey and want tools that will grow with you. Maybe members of your remote or global team are frustrated with your current communication software. Team chat is often the virtual office for your organization, where employees spend a significant portion of their working hours.

This summer, 17 contributors completed the Google Summer of Code(GSoC) program with the Zulip development community. This was the 9th consecutive year that Zulip participated in GSoC; over 120 contributors have now completed one of our formal internship programs, primarily through Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Our welcoming community is fully committed to helping bring up the next generation of open-source contributors from a wide range of backgrounds.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 9.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Zulip’s 100% open-source software is available as a cloud service or a self-hosted solution, and is used by thousands of organizations around the world.

Last week, Slack’s users realized that under the company’s terms of service, their private data could be used to train artificial-intelligence models. This came as a shock: chat messages convey sensitive company data, and LLMs(large language models, the category of AI models that includes ChatGPT) are known to leak the data they are trained on.

Today is my three-year anniversary as the product leader for Zulip, the organized team chat product. When I left my job as a data science manager at Lyft, the career change felt like an experiment. Now, I’ve been reflecting on why it’s hard to imagine working on anything else. I’ve never had much patience for technology that’s not doing what I need it to do. Confusing interfaces drive me crazy.

This summer, 13 contributors completed the Google Summer of Code(GSoC) program with the Zulip development community. This was the 8th consecutive year that Zulip participated in GSoC; over 100 contributors have now completed one of our formal internship programs, primarily through Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Our welcoming community is fully committed to helping bring up the next generation of open-source contributors from a wide range of backgrounds.

On Friday last week, we announced Zulip 8.0 and some big pricing changes for Zulip’s self-hosted customers. In response to feedback from our user community, today we are adding a new Basic plan for self-hosted Zulip installations. The Basic plan is priced at $3.50/user/month, and includes unlimited access to mobile push notifications. It does not include commercial support, which still requires purchasing a Business or Enterprise plan.