We are proud to introduce Element Starter: a brand new offering designed to provide IT administrators with a free, self-hosted, and user-friendly on-ramp to the world of secure communications and digital sovereignty.

After trying to understand if Synapse was still the preferred community method for Matrix after the post on Element X/ESS, I thought I’d share this.

Element Starter is a game-changer, offering a free (as in beer) self-hosted version of Element Server Suite. It is a lightweight version of the officially supported Kubernetes-based components found in our paid packages (Business, Enterprise and Sovereign) - the very same stack used to power the biggest Matrix homeservers in the world; built by the team who created Matrix.

Element Starter is designed to allow anyone in the world (who doesn’t need to start with our powerful paid-for enterprise features) to adopt Element Server Suite for free. This option gives them all the real-time communication functionality they expect from a leading messaging and collaboration app with the added benefit of self-hosting to ensure data ownership and control, while building on a wrought-iron foundation which is futureproofed for commercial support and features on demand.

Really surprised I can’t located migration methods anywhere, though. And that all the Element X app repos are still labeled pre-release but the blog says they are production ready.

Edit: This does require sign in and terms of use agreements, so I’ll be sticking to my Synapse docker container for now.