Mattermost team here. Agree we could have done a better job communicating. The change started in 2023 and we had made a lot of effort to work with the largest unsupported deployments early.
Our understanding is that the organizations most impacted were those using the unsupported Mattermost commercial version, not the open source version. The commercial version of Mattermost is offered in Docker, K8, etc.
If you look into the license of the Mattermost instance you ran, what is the "Enterprise Edition" (i.e. commercial version that upgrades into paid offering) or under MIT license (open source licensed offering, bundled with GitLab omnibus)?
HN has a lot of people building SaaS and open core companies, so hopefully this thread is a good way to learn about export compliance, which is something we've been doing for many years, though it's gotten extra important in 2022 due to so many new sanctions showing up.
Think of it this way (in a simplified, high level view that doesn't capture all the detail, but intended to share the aesthetic):
1. When you're an early stage company based in the U.S. starting to sell open core licenses or SaaS you typically hire a lawyer to do the legal agreements and help negotiate contracts.
2. If it's a good lawyer, they might talk about "export compliance" and how your company might need to think about doing an assessment on how your product is classified in the context of U.S. export compliance restrictions.
3. If they're a really good lawyer, they may even recommend an export compliance consultant for you to use.
4. After you get your export compliance classification, you're going to need a way to implement the right checks to ensure you're not violating U.S. export compliance laws based on your classification and your customers.
5. You quickly realize you need to buy a tool to do this--not only to check at the time of transaction, but also to alert you if the status of a customer changes (for example, if a customer is added to a list of organizations flagged by public sector organizations).
6. You look at different options, and end up purchasing one and integrating it with your other systems, including Salesforce (sales automation) and Marketo (email automation). In this case, we purchased a subscription to Descartes.
Hopefully that helps share context. Please feel free to ask other questions here.
Mattermost CEO here,
Thanks for the question. Like many companies we use a 3rd party service to check if someone we’re doing business with a company that has been flagged on export compliance.
We've had administrative error in our compliance automation. If you received an email from [email protected] on June 23, 2022 titled "Our limitations due to new United States sanctions" please disregard it.
Mattermost CEO here, sorry to hear you had a negative experience with the admin adviser. Thank you for the feedback.
Mattermost Team Edition is designed for teams (I.e. groups of people that work together and trust each other) and there were issues when Team Edition was deployed to unintended use cases—-like hosting hundreds of users, saving millions of posts, or other scenarios outside of what a team was meant to do.
Admin adviser was meant to help admins who hit those scenarios, and some of the advisory in scenarios Team Edition wasn’t intended to handle was for the Enterprise Edition. It sounds like that came across the wrong way and we should revisit.
Note: I think a fair chunk of admin advisor was paused a while ago. Not sure how much is running these days. Regardless we should take a look.
On 1), our SaaS version is equivalent to our higher end Enterprise Edition E20 and aimed at larger orgs. For small orgs we have the open source version that can be easily self-hosted. That said, it sounds like price is material for you, so maybe there’s something we can do at a lower price tier, with features closer to our open source product.
On 2), Focalboard is still in its early days. We are using it internally and with early adopters of the open source version and are pretty excited about where it could go—replacing Trello, Asana, Notion, Jire, Confluence on-prem and as SaaS in the long run, and on an open source platform you can customize.
Our hope is in future there could be a “Why we switched to Mattermost and Focalboard” with a blog post on replacing a fair chunk of the collaboration stack with an open source alternative that could be extended.
Mattermost team here. Agree we could have done a better job communicating. The change started in 2023 and we had made a lot of effort to work with the largest unsupported deployments early.
They were very aware of the direction ahead of the August 2025 announce. From then, there was still over a year of support during the transition: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
Our understanding is that the organizations most impacted were those using the unsupported Mattermost commercial version, not the open source version. The commercial version of Mattermost is offered in Docker, K8, etc.
If you look into the license of the Mattermost instance you ran, what is the "Enterprise Edition" (i.e. commercial version that upgrades into paid offering) or under MIT license (open source licensed offering, bundled with GitLab omnibus)?