As you rightly say, you can use any client for Element Home and the only restriction is that the in-app setup and migration wizard is only available in the Element web clients at the moment (this is now corrected in the blog article).
That said, the Matrix->Matrix migration tools (https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration) can be used outside of the setup flow, to help migrate your existing chats to new accounts. So people can always use those separately from host setup, if needed.
Yep, as you say, you get to chat with anyone in the Matrix ecosystem (or even further afield if you use bridges).
> You can only have 5 people with addresses at your server
Actually, it's better than this. You can technically have as many people / accounts as you like registered on your server, but you're limited to 5 active users by default. Users are considered "active" if they've been logged in to and using your server for more than two days in a given 30 day period.
Ahh... thanks for pointing that out. That was a mistake in the blog article (fixed now).
In fact the migrator only works on the web apps at the moment (not desktop or mobile).
That said, even if the in-app migrator isn't available to other clients, people are obviously free to set up Element Nickel or Home direct from the website.
As some of the others have said, custom DNS is largely for vanity and discoverability reasons. People know that they can find your website on your domain, why not chat to you on Matrix there too? :)
In addition to that though, there's also the aspect of being able to choose to host your homeserver on your own infrastructure, using your own domain, should you want to.
In Matrix your homeserver (domain) name is "baked in" to every event created by your homeserver, which means that you can't change it after setup. If your homeserver is set up on, say, "foo.ems.host", you can take a snapshot of the data at any point but you couldn't just set it up to run on your domain. If you start hosting with your own custom DNS pointed at EMS then you can take over and host on your own infrastructure at any point.
As mentioned in this thread, Element home is intended to make it as easy as possible for people to get up and running with their own Matrix homeserver. To do this we've really reduced the number of configuration steps in initial setup as much as possible, including hiding custom DNS setup which can be quite complicated.
This won't be a problem for most people, but if you're interested in custom DNS (and want EMS to host it for you), you'd probably want to start with the EMS Nickel package, with custom DNS, rather than Element Home.
It's worth noting that we're currently working on "account portability" which would allow you to decouple homeservers from specific domains. So, once this is available you should be able to change domain names etc. at any point.
I think that you've got it already, but just to clarify the pricing, the costs and constraints for Nickel and Element Home hosts are the same - $10 per month for up to 5 active users. Additional users can be added at an additional cost of $2/per user/month.
Hi - Yep, we totally get that this won't be for everyone. We're currently looking for ways to be able to increase the efficiency of these smaller servers and to be able to pass those cost reductions on to customers. We've also got some projects in the works aimed at being able to offer single account / single user "homeservers" and obviously the pricing for these would be much lower, but we're not quite there yet. More info. on this as soon as we have it.
In case it's not clear, it isn't a 5 person limit for Element Home servers, it's just that up to 5 (active) users are included in your subscription. You can add more users at any time for an additional $2/month. Also bear in mind that you're not charged for everyone registered on your homserver, just the ones that are using it :)
What hosting provider are you using? AWS, GCP, and Azure are several times more expensive with the same performance as smaller providers, of which DigitalOcean provides the worst performance. (50% less) https://vpsbenchmarks.com
AWS bandwidth through anything but Lightsail is 1000 times more expensive. AWS servers are 3-5x more expensive. AWS isn't successful because it's good, it's successful because it has good marketing.
Thanks for the info on Lightsail. We'll look in to it as one of the options for the future.
As for AWS, yep, they're certainly not cheap, but they do have good points in quite a few areas and give you a great number of tools to build with. Hopefully the trick is not to get too dependent upon their infrastructure, and we'll definitely be looking to other cloud platforms to help bring the costs down in future.
Yes, we are hiring (and are rapidly growing at the moment)! Thanks for the link - I'll pass it on to one of the team (not just saying that, I really will). That said, in the mean time you're probably best to have a look at the open positions (https://apply.workable.com/elementio/) and see if there's something there that particularly takes your fancy. If there is, apply, and say that Rick from EMS sent you via way of HN ;)
> As for AWS, yep, they're certainly not cheap, but they do have good points in quite a few areas and give you a great number of tools to build with. Hopefully the trick is not to get too dependent upon their infrastructure, and we'll definitely be looking to other cloud platforms to help bring the costs down in future.
AWS wins because it has a fun user interface and good marketing.
> they're certainly not cheap
The cheapest component (compute) of an on-demand EC2 instance is five times more expensive than Linode, Vultr, and OVH. Bandwidth is, I'm not exaggerating at all, 1000 times more expensive. If you use reserved instance discounts and Spot Instances, it's still two times more expensive than hourly-billed Linode and Vultr.
If you're willing to bear with its worse GUI and monthly billing, OVH is a good choice. They've been in business for longer than AWS and operate more servers. Their prices are so low that they're in shortage. If you need instances that aren't in shortage, try Azure.
"AWS Cost Optimization Guru" is a mistake. The best way to optimize your AWS costs is to migrate off of AWS.
> give you a great number of tools to build with
Yes, although you could host your compute at one of the third-parties I mentioned, and still call into AWS services. It adds a little bit of latency for great cost savings. Linode and Vultr gives you DNS, Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, and private network in addition to compute.
> Yes, we are hiring
Let me know where I could be most useful at Element, or if there's a need for a general fixer role.
Up to 5 Monthly Active Users are included in your subscription. After that you can add additional users at an additional $2 per user per month.
It's worth noting that the Monthly Active bit can be quite important. What this means is that you're not charged for the number of users registered on your server, but the number who are actively using the server. Users are only considered as "active" and counting towards the number that you pay for if they use the account for more than two days in a rolling 30 day period. The aim here is that you're not penalised for occasional or "drive-by" users of the service.
(Disclaimer -- I head up EMS (Element Matrix Services))
That's smart - I know I've had a couple of folks interested enough to download the app, but not interested enough to use it on a daily basis.
If I may, I'd like to push a little deeper on this. Why the single-digit user limit at that price? Doubling or quadrupling the users, or halving the price, would make it a no-brainer of an option to point people to if they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up their own server. As it stands, the pricing feels restrictive to the point where I would feel punished for growing my server (I'd instead tell someone to get their own matrix.org address, at which point it sounds like we could just use Discord/Signal/Slack?). The extra financial burden (these are my family and friends, so I would never ask them to chip in) would actually incentivize me to keep my server as small as possible, which is the antithesis of what the goal of a hosted service should be.
As I write this, I'm realizing that there's no real utility here for anyone technical enough to warm to Matrix/Element's strengths. We can talk about the everyman who's not on HN all we want, but my hunch is that those people would rather just use Signal or Discord based on their use-case - no confusing concepts like "homeservers" and "federation". With a user limit and the current pricing model, every use-case (from a short tryout to a long-term personal homserver) is better served either by the free matrix.org model or by a self-hosted solution.
Hi - I head up Element Matrix Services (EMS), so hopefully I can answer some of these questions for you.
Element home is really aimed at helping to get less technical users up and running with their own home on Matrix as quickly and easily as possible.
Under the hood Element Home servers and our smaller / Nickel products are pretty similar (similar resource allocations etc.). The main differences are in the setup process.
With Element Home we've created a whole new setup process and have tried to reduce the number of configuration steps, selecting default options wherever possible.
The trade-off for this is that while many of these options are changeable after setup, some (like custom DNS) are not. So, if you're a bit more technical and want things like custom DNS, then you're better to start off with a Nickel host.
> But another example could be that they want their Riot to default to their homeserver and not to matrix.org.
This isn't valid. They could absolutely ship Riot with its existing branding, with a config set to use their (or any other) homeserver. The matrix.org homeserver just happens to be the default (at the moment).
Imagine somebody using a Librem Riot version that has been modified to default to the Librem homeserver. Now that user needs to use Riot on a new device and ends up with the standard Riot. The user doesn't see any difference but just finds that it fails.
If the user calls Librem support then they have figure out what is going on. Which costs money and they still have a frustrated user.
Branding is often not about what is technically or legally possible, but about creating the right perception with users.
That said, the Matrix->Matrix migration tools (https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration) can be used outside of the setup flow, to help migrate your existing chats to new accounts. So people can always use those separately from host setup, if needed.