The biggest problem for a potential customer of a new service like this is that there is a high probability that the service won't be around in two years. The cost of the service itself is almost irrelevant: the cost of switching to something else can be very high, especially if the customer has more than a dozen users.
That's why XMPP is so attractive, even though there aren't many features built on it: you can run your own server, on metal or a VM platform, you can buy service with a guarantee that someone can take it over smoothly if one business model fails.
The biggest problem for a potential customer of a new service like this is that there is a high probability that the service won't be around in two years. The cost of the service itself is almost irrelevant: the cost of switching to something else can be very high, especially if the customer has more than a dozen users.
That's why XMPP is so attractive, even though there aren't many features built on it: you can run your own server, on metal or a VM platform, you can buy service with a guarantee that someone can take it over smoothly if one business model fails.