Run it on your own server, free.
Not a trial, not a community edition, not a stripped-down build. The same software we host, with every feature, and no limit on how many people use it.
What you need
Modest. It's a C daemon over SQLite, not a cluster of services.
A machine
A small VPS is plenty for most teams. A box in your office works just as well, and so does one with no internet route at all.
A C toolchain
Build it with make. You'll need a compiler and the
SQLite development headers — nothing exotic.
Somewhere for files
Attachments go to object storage you control. Point it at your own bucket and the quota is whatever you decide it is.
Federated services, included at no cost
Some things genuinely can't be done from a server we don't operate — waking a phone through Apple and Google, for one. So we run those for you, free, whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Single sign-on
Let people sign in with your organization's identity provider. We relay the login and re-issue a token scoped to your workspace alone.
Mobile push
Wake iOS and Android devices through Apple and Google without handing either of them your message text.
SCIM provisioning
Create and deactivate accounts automatically from your identity provider as people join and leave.
App directory
A catalog of integrations your workspace can wire up. The connections themselves are local to your server.
Every one of these is opt-in, per function. Enroll for push and skip sign-on, or take none of them and stay entirely stand-alone. Turning them on never puts us in the message path — that isn't something federation can change.
Or depend on nothing at all
Stand-alone mode talks to no service we operate. There's no license check, no telemetry, and no callback — it will run happily on a network that cannot reach us. The trade is the federated conveniences above, mobile push most noticeably. For a lot of teams that's the right trade, and it's the reason the mode exists.
When you'd rather not run it
Self-hosting means you own the uptime: patches, backups, and the 3am page when the disk fills. If that's not a job you want, we'll do it for $99 a month. It's the same software — you're buying the operations, not a better version.
Get the source
Clone it, build it, run it. The docs cover the whole path.