A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

Maybe if you literally call in to the conference? Not sure why you’d ever want to do that, but...

For about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we live in!

I think it wa a disaster for Russia, didn't really happen in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova; meh for Romainia, Bulgaria, pretty good for some of the Warsaw countries west of those (DDR a special case). Anything can be exploited (communism or complete liberalism/libertarianism and everything between) but the people who did the best* seemed to have taken less an ideological view and more of a pick and choose with a slight lean against the old system. Places like Czech for example.

I'm talking about the 1990s and early 00s.

* I wound't agree with them all, even the successful ones...but as none of them are my country it's not really any of my business except to learn via observation.

It doesn't have the "enterprisy" integrations that give companies control they want, such as where you integrate logins with your AD/SSO/whatever system. You could kick employees that leave from your server, but that doesn't mean there's no company information in their DMs with other employees. You can insist people set up a work account, but you still can't deactivate it when they leave.

You can't enforce password length requirements, or whatever your security team recommends this year.

You can't disable parts of the offering, like voice chat, to enforce people use hangouts or whatever your company wide solution is.

At the same time, things companies may want employees to do easily but gaming communities don't want, such as allowing any user to create a channel are not possible with Discord's permission model.

If you want users to see only self-selected subsets of information, you can't really. You could break your company's chat across multiple servers, but this is tedious compared to just having channels users can join or not. For example, in my last employer, I was in 40 or so channels out of several thousand.

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I think for a startup or small business, none of these things are that important. But for medium or large companies, they become more of a problem.

We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure.

There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected.

There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well.

But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely.

To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them.

You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.