Hi @rtfm98, Mattermost CEO here, and I greatly appreciate your thoughtful note. While we want to support system admins who choose Mattermost, there’s a size of Mattermost that presents a material risk to brand and trust, and that creates confusion with the name “Mattermost Team Edition” when we are far, far beyond any notion of a “team”.
If you’re work is mission critical or it requires data residency under regulation, we have a customer team who can support you in building the business value case for purchasing full licenses.
Alternatively, your organization can compile your own version of the Mattermost open source project with any user limits you choose, as user limits only apply to the version compiled by Mattemost, Inc., a commercial company that stands behind the offerings it compiles.
We have been transparent in this thread since 2023 the intention to move to 10,000 user limits, then to 5,000 then to 1,000 this year, and we realize there’s a small number of very large deployments that we need to support through the transition period—I’ve flown around the world meeting with some of the largest deployments to support their champions in making the business case to IT leadership for the right amount of investment. If it’s feasible, I’m happy to meet you in-person to support.
After this transition period, new deployments will have full visibility and in-product warnings about user limits as they grow, and we should avoid some of the friction discussed by a few folks in this thread.
Thank you again for your input and feedback, and very thoughtful note.