Subscription overview

Mattermost offers features through Mattermost Professional and Mattermost Enterprise subscription plans. Your plan subscription determines what features you have access to. When choosing a subscription, you can choose the deployment type as self-hosted or Cloud.

Mattermost self-hosted deployments require a license subscription key to be applied to access features in the Professional or Enterprise plans. Mattermost offers a secure self-service Customer Portal where you can purchase and manage your Mattermost self-hosted subscription. When you complete the purchase process, a license key is generated. Please see Self-hosted subscriptions for more details.

Mattermost Cloud is a software-as-a-service product. You can sign up for free, forever, with Mattermost Free. Then, start a free 30-day Mattermost Enterprise trial, to explore paid features. Please see Cloud subscriptions for more details.

Mattermost Nonprofit License program

The Mattermost Nonprofit License enables nonprofit organizations who are unable to afford our commercial licenses to apply the benefits of the self-hosted Mattermost Professional offering towards advancing their missions with special nonprofit pricing.

What’s included?

A three-year subscription to our Mattermost Professional self-hosted offering for up to 1,000 users with a subscription fee of $250 USD. Upon acceptance of these terms, Mattermost has the right to place the name and logo of the nonprofit or charitable institution on our website and in our marketing materials.

Following the three-year subscription, the institution can renew the license every three years for an additional $250 USD subscription fee.

Who’s eligible?

Organizations applying for a non-profit license must meet ALL of the following requirements:

Be able to provide documentation that establishes the organization as a recognized nonprofit status.
Have no affiliation with government, academic, commercial, or religious entities.
Be unable to afford a commercial Mattermost license.
Be willing to let us use their logo for promotional purposes.
Be willing to pay a $250 processing fee for a three-year, self-hosted Professional license contract for up to 1000 users.

If your organization doesn’t fit this description, we suggest that you purchase a commercial license instead.

If you represent an open source community or project that is not hosted under a recognized nonprofit, but would like a commercial license for Mattermost, please email community@mattermost.com with your organization’s needs and requirements.

How to apply?

To apply for the Mattermost Nonprofit License, please complete this form. Please note that it may take up to six weeks for us to respond to your request.

Mattermost educational license program

For academic licensing, please see: https://mattermost.com/education/

Frequently asked questions

Are my credit card details safe?

We use Stripe and Solupay to process credit card transactions. We do not store any credit card details at any stage. Payments made by credit card are authenticated using 3D Secure, which is PCI-DSS compliant.

Should you wish to make payment using another method, please contact our Billing team.

Why do I need to provide my name and physical address when purchasing a subscription?

Mattermost is a U.S. corporation and, therefore, all business we do is governed by the laws of the United States, in addition to the local laws wherever we are doing business.

The United States has a number of export control regulations implemented to protect national security interests and to promote its foreign policy objectives. Based on these regulations, U.S. companies are prohibited from doing business with specific countries which have been embargoed by the U.S. government. They are also prohibited from exporting certain items to certain countries that have been sanctioned by the U.S. government. In addition, U.S. companies are prohibited from doing business with specific people and/or companies that have been named and listed by the U.S. government.

In order to comply with these requirements, Mattermost must collect the name and physical address of all individuals and companies it does business with so that it can comply with the U.S. export controls regulations.

What does Mattermost do with this information?

The information you provide is used for a screening process. There are two different purposes for screening:

One screening is to ensure against exports of certain restricted goods to countries that are embargoed. In our case, goods refer to our software that has encryption in it.
The other screening is against people and companies. There are certain people and companies that the government has put on a list (the Denied Party List) that US companies are prohibited from doing any business with for various reasons. They could be terrorists, be on a terrorist watch list, could be helping finance terrorists, could be participating in human rights violations, etc. If they are on the Denied Party List, we are not able to do any business with them.

Who are the sanctioned people, companies, and entities?

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) maintains a list of sanctioned entities. Some examples include:

Terrorists
Banks or other financial institutions that are involved in financing terrorism
Companies or people that have been involved in human or drug trafficking
Organizations that have been sanctioned for human rights violations

This will also include people in violation of government contracts because of our business with the U.S. government. Individuals and Companies do not end up on the Denied Party List based on the country they live in but by their actions and conduct.

What does “physical address” mean for software that will be used in many places?

In this case, the “physical address” is the location where the individual, who will be receiving the license key, is physically located and will be able to access the software for installation.

How is a user defined for subscriptions?

For the purpose of billing, a “user” is any account created in Mattermost that has not been deactivated by the System Administrator. You can see your user count for billing purposes from the System Console on the Site Statistics page under “Total Active Users”. Guests are also defined as users.

Do I need to pay for deactivated users?

No. If you deactivate a user, that user is not counted as an active user during your annual renewal process. You can deactivate users manually via the System Console, and also via Active Directory/LDAP synchronization, the mmctl tool, and the server APIs.

If you choose to pull SQL reports from the database to monitor individual activity to make deactivation decisions, and you are running under high user load, we recommend the reports are pulled from a read replica of the database.

Which features are affected when my subscription expires?

The affected features include, but are not limited to, the following:

Feature	How it’s affected	What steps do I need to take?
Elasticsearch	Elasticsearch is automatically disabled and will start using the default database for indexing posts.	None needed.
AD/LDAP, SAML SSO, Office 365 SSO, and Google SSO	Login options are no longer provided on the sign-in page. Users who previously signed in with one of these methods are no longer able to. Users who were already signed in can continue to use Mattermost until their session expires or until they log out.	Users must be migrated to email authentication via System Console > Users. Select the drop-down menu for the relevant member, choose Switch to Email/Password, enter a new password, and choose Reset.
AD/LDAP	Groups in the database are retained but cannot be used. Memberships are frozen in state for group synced teams/channels. Mentions for AD/LDAP groups are not shown in the autocomplete menu. Group mentions are no longer highlighted in text and do not trigger new notifications.	Use mmctl to modify group sync settings for the team/channel.
High availability	High availability is disabled. If all nodes in a cluster continue running, the nodes will stop communicating and caches will get out of sync. This is likely to cause delays in messages, notifications, etc.	None needed.
Performance monitoring	Monitoring is disabled and Grafana will no longer update with new data.	None needed.
Compliance exports	Jobs are no longer scheduled in the job server. Data is not exported.	None needed.
Data retention	Jobs are no longer scheduled in the job server. Data is not deleted.	None needed.
Custom terms	Custom terms no longer displayed to end users on login. Data is retained in the Terms of Service database table.	None needed.
Custom announcement banners	No longer visible and is replaced by the default announcement banner.	None needed.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)	MFA is no longer enforced/required for new accounts but remains enabled for those who configured it.	None needed.
Permissions	Permissions are retained in the database in a frozen state and cannot be modified in the System Console.	Use mmctl to reset permissions to default.
Guest accounts	Guests that are not actively logged in are prevented from logging in. Guests who are actively logged in are able to use Mattermost until their session expires or they log out.	None needed.

Is there a maximum number of users per subscription?

No, there is no limit to the subscription value or number of users you can purchase per plan.

What happens if my department buys a Mattermost subscription and then central IT buys a high volume subscription that also covers my department?

Mattermost subscriptions and support benefits are per production instance.

When the subscription for your department’s production instance expires, you can either discontinue your department’s production instance and move to the instance hosted by central IT (which can optionally provision one or more teams for your department to control), or you can renew your subscription to maintain control of your department’s instance (e.g., to configure or customize the system in a manner highly specific to your line-of-business) in addition to using the instance from central IT.