31–40 of 180 posts
I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the…
We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.
But good luck!
From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily mode…
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the…
> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings. Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck. Give me Teams Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where…
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily mode…
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From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily mode…
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It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second.
Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure.
It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers.
Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it.
I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily mode…
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But the per-request cost is not the only one. You're also paying $0.02 per million CPU-microseconds. If you do the math, that's easily double or triple the equivalent hourly charge for VM instances from the various major cloud providers.
For now, you're benefiting from the zero idle charges and Cloudflare's generous free allowance, because you're at a small scale. As you get bigger, the effect of those factors -- as a fraction of your total spending -- will decrease by a lot, and you'll still be paying the inflated unit costs.
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the…
Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations. We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage. But good luck!