8,462 users on a free plan with no intention of upgrading to paid.
He never said he had no intention, I just think he didn't want to pay half a million dollars for slack.
We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
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Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#12This was very similar to the Reactiflux move to Discord:
https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-... (October 2015)
To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users. Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand users.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#13The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only make sense for internal teams. He is trying so hard to make his own mistake sound like Slack's fault.
Also, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#14Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 50…
If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
No history by default, in fact there's only text by default.
I like IRC, but newer generations are used to having "full-featured" chats without setup (beauty is in the eye of the beholder).
I also like being able to do some simple markdown in my messages.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#15Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 50…
If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
IRC doesn't have cool stickers?
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#168,462 users on a free plan with no intention of upgrading to paid.
On a service where all paid plans charge per user, starting to pay when you reach a point when their free plan is no longer suitable for your high number of users is always going to be a ridiculous proposition for even the cheapest plan. The Slack pricing structure is not designed for this use case.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#17I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less of us: around 30.
I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous.
We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#18I'm generally a slack fan, but isn't that just plain ol' illegal false advertising?
It sounds like more of an engineering issue. I'd imagine that unlimited-up-to-the-capacity-our-system-can-handle is reasonable.
The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first to get confirmation on how it will work for your specific scenario, and not just use their sales page.
Particularly when that tool is so important to your operations.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#19Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 50…
This is true, but there is still no excuse for blatantly false marketing messages claiming an unlimited size.
Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)
#20So wait, you abused a free service to the extreme and you're complaining about the service not meeting your expectations? Grow up.