“We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely” doesn’t exactly garner confidence from an article written by a competitor. SMH.
When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
51–60 of 267 posts
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#52Is there ground for legal action, particularly if you depended on this? It seems like a contract of sorts, and if any of their sales people ever assured anyone it was "free forever" I think that becomes a verbal contact.
I’m a lawyer. I think a reasonably competently drafted terms of service could obviate most legal exposure. In the event that a promissory estoppel cause of action was established (like other posters have, I think, correctly noted, but which would also be an expensive affirmative burden to prove in court) then the plaintiff would still have to prove damages. And what is that, $10 per month per user for the affected period? And I don’t think “forever” is an enforceable affected period.
So short answer, probably no practical legal remedy imho.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
IANAL, but: 'If only one party offers consideration, the agreement is a "bare promise" and is unenforceable.' [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in_English_law
Consideration doesn't have to be money. Facebook doesn't charge you money and nevertheless has enforceable contracts.
what contract terms can you enforce against Facebook?
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#54I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility. One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk…
If your free plan is unreliable good luck converting users to paid though.
I have a tiny VPS that costs less than $2 per month. I run a chat server on it. In seven years it has had no failures and one hour of planned downtime. That's better than any of the major cloud services. Simple stuff is surprisingly reliable.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#55This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
I feel like if its 2023 and you're still gullible enough to fall for "free forever" bait and switch offerings from cloud providers then we need to have a frank discussion on neofeudalist late stage capitalism where a mainstay of its many successes in the digital realm is to literally trick you into consuming a product and pretend like it never happened.
It’s just straight–up fraud. People have been defrauding each other for a while now; I don’t think we need to invent hypotheticals like “neofeudalist late stage capitalism” to explain that behavior.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#56Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ... I wish things weren't all free…
> maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
Well I bet how much those free accounts were costing is way less than $10 per month per user. The self hosting page suggests that you can have "up to 1,000 users" on a few dollar VPS. A little more if you need to upload tons and tons of images.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#57For the love of God, just use Zulip :) It’s how we stay sane.
You should use Zulip not because it's free, but rather because it's excellent and kicks the pants off of Slack and its clones, who are more of an impediment to productivity than an aid. (Well, the desktop experience is excellent, but the phone app is lacking.)
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#58If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.
I agree with the sentiments but I don't know if that's feasible
If an ad for a depression medicine on the tv has time to say crazy things like “side effects may include depression, […] and death”, I am sure Charter and Comcast have enough time to say that their gigabit coax service is only gigabit for downloads, not for uploads.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#59This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever. However, the existence of this post also makes Zulip committed deeper to not pull the rug on the free plan. Whenever that happens, I’d like to believe that there would be grandfathering for existing users on the free plan (unlike the rug pull that Google attempted with its free GSuite/Workplace offering and decided to not do it after a lot of backlash and bad press).
One thing I dislike about these chat platforms is limited message history. The 10,000-messages or 90-day message search history limits are arbitrary as well as too short to be useful for any group that has more than a few members on a specific topic/area. For some (or many?) people, this will be a practical and annoying limitation that makes the platform useless for anything other than trivial chats where history doesn’t matter (except for “this is what you said two days ago”).
Instead, they could consider offering very small (?) teams unlimited history. Platforms like Telegram (and Discord too, not sure?) are offering more and more features for free. Enterprise application integrations may be one area where Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat/Zulip may have an advantage for the time being.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? Naively as a non-{marketing,business development,COO} guy, I feel like the cost to keep delivering those services ought to pale in comparison to the value of having even a tiny number of those customers go into a forum like HN or Reddit and say "we've been there since the early days and we're really happy". Sure, it's inherently a tech/financia…
> Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? It’s really hard to quantify the positive benefit of letting them stay, and really easy to quantify that letting them stay is going to cost us $500/month forever.
Turnover still applies to the “free” users. If the burden is simply so high the company is going to fail otherwise then do what you got to do, but don’t assume grandfathering people in means spending X$/month for the next hundred years or anything.