What less expensive (or open source) alternatives (beyond Discord) are you finding effective?
What do you like or dislike about the tool you’re using?
Is there any solution for this that doesn't kill battery for Android, and one that works at all for iOS?
Another possibility is to not include content in the push messages and just send an "there is new content" using the official Zulip push service.
If you run a Zulip server, you can have it send mobile notifications without needing to compile the mobile apps yourself. Lots of people do that, though their motivations may be different from the grandparent's.
This does mean sending the notifications through a central notification "bouncer" service which we run, and that page of our docs explains why the way Google and Apple have designed their push-notification systems makes this necessary.
We're working on end-to-end encryption of the push notifications: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 Once that's done, that will mean that the content can't be read by the bouncer service, nor by Google or Apple en route.
(There may be a kludge like the one described above for Zulip, but last I checked about a year ago, there wasn't).
It's hard to imagine a situation where a few dollars per user per month is genuinely prohibitive.
You can run your own private server and private federation. You don't have to federate with Matrix.org, you can make your own company federation, or hobby or whatever and federate with others. It's fully encrypted and has web based, desktop client based and mobile app support from multiple different clients. Riot is the most popular and what we currently use. Has amazing VOIP integration. It'll run easily on a low-tier linode VPS.
It's about the closest thing to Discord we could find that, and it's way, way more secure.
I was never able to get this working!
Looking for more options and trying to avoid the reflexive “but discord” response or the discussion devolving into a debate about the pros and cons of Discord.
It also has a free tier up to 10 users, that retains the most recent 10k messages.
