Could you say what clients do you use?
> we plan on creating an XMPP server for ourselves
This surprisingly took less effort than I anticipated when I set up mine (from this [0] list) and I can see most of this modules were incorporated into "core". There is also ejabberd.
[0]: https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-module...
We use Xabber on our android phones, and I use Pidgin on my laptop. It works well enough, though Xabber is a bit annoying as it leaves a notification on the screen all of the time. Pidgin also doesn't come with OTR natively for some reason.
Thanks for the link! I'll definitely look over it again when I finally decide to set a server up.
However Daniel really took XMPP and ran with it: That XMPP is still feasible is in no small part thanks to him, so if you can spare the money that's a simple way to show appreciation.