Zulip is open source team chat software for distributed teams. Zulip combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email, and is 100% free and open source software.

Our vision is a world in which the best software for every major problem is free and open source software, developed thoughtfully in the open.

The core of Zulip is its incredibly vibrant open source community, with dozens of contributors who've contributed 100+ commits to the project. We have such a large contributor base in part because of our focus on creating a sustainability in our development model, with 150K words of developer documentation, 10,000s of carefully written commit history, and nearly 100% test coverage for the server. These investments also help ensure Zulip can remain an active project for decades to come.

How Zulip is funded

Kandra Labs, the company organized around Zulip, is a values-focused, for-profit company. We are a for-profit company because this allows us to organize and pay an incredible group of people to work on this problem. But unlike most other popular open source applications, we are not taking venture capital, because our priority is social impact and open source values, and that is not compatible with VC funding. As a result, Zulip has been funded by revenue, ~$1M in grants from the US National Science Foundation, and a great deal of the founder's personal savings.

Since we're not taking venture capital, donations can have a material impact on our ability to spend money ahead of revenue to improve the project and grow its community. We run an extremely generous free hosting program for hundreds of organizations, including open source projects, academic research groups, and much more. This free hosting program is responsible for most of Zulip's hosting expenses; we hope this GitHub sponsors program will eventually grow to fund those hosting expenses.

Should GitHub sponsors somehow result in more funding than that, we'd use the money to help pay the expenses of our full-time core team that manages the project, tracks down difficult bugs, integrates changes, and keeps our hosted service running happily.

We greatly appreciate your support! If you don't have money to spare, consider promoting Zulip and other free and open source applications in your community, at your job, and on social media.