I currently run a site with around 5k members and have been using CometChat for not quite a full year yet, but was just informed by them that they have discontinued their self-hosting option. This means I lose out on any new updates and can no longer upgrade or make additional add-on purchases for my site’s chat. (I should have seen this coming back when they eliminated the analytics and stats in my dashboard months ago.)
My options are to let it go and continue without future upgrades or support, which is hard because it seems I always have to contact their support for some issue that I can’t seem to fix, or move to one of their cloud-based options. The two cheapest solutions are $49 and $99, neither of which provide the option to export your data, despite the data retention lengths being only 7 days and 30 days, respectively.
My site is a marketplace and keeping conversations between users is very important, not just for disputes down the road, but my users only being able to see conversations from the last 7 days is just a terrible option.
I’ve been looking at ArrowChat as an alternative, but would like to know if anyone has any experience with it, or preferably both, and if it runs smooth. My main concerns here are data retention, bugs and support.