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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

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Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#191

Post by jprd »

samstave wrote: post #146
pygy_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind. https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202... https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic

DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX. Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. - But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model... The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also m…

It is still so friggin' weird to me that Reddit had the longevity over Digg.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#192

Post by verdverm »

jmull wrote: post #163

People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way…

There is an argument to be made that while it looks like a loss in a limited time frame, having all those new developers become advocates later on will pay itself back

---

edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar argument might be made still

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#193

Post by turtlebits »

esprehn wrote: post #115

My wife and I have used slack for years for our personal chat. The multiple channels made categorizing the messages easy (ex. #house, #kid1, #kid2, #coding, etc). The change in free retention meant we'd lose important messages so we've given up on slack and moved to a different service. I'm sure our small usage of it won't matter to slack, but the money grab and their insistence that this change was somehow better fo…

I hate this entitled attitude. There is no “money grab”. They own the service, they’re free to set whatever price they want. If you don’t want to pay, don’t use it.

In other words, don’t rely on “free”, as there is no such thing.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#194

Post by lazyasciiart »

fivre wrote: post #88
JadoJodo wrote: post #21

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/c…

rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread. i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with…

I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#195

Post by aendruk »

manquer wrote: post #129
Teckla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.

To me it is a feature not a limitation

So read it as:

> The biggest problem with IRC [for Slack’s principle use case, which does not apply to me] has always been its lack of server-side history.

You can understand that while still personally preferring another messaging model.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#196

Post by nyellin »

Slacks pricing model makes sense for business workspaces, but it doesn't work well for public communities.

I run the Slack community for https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta

We'd gladly pay, but pricing needs to be different when you have a community that is open to the public and has far, far more users than the size of your company.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#198

Post by MexicanJoe »

bachmeier wrote: post #173
MexicanJoe wrote: post #160

It's $6.67 per user. Just get a paid account. But no... people will spend hours or days switching to an alternative, and then they have to maintain it which will be even more time. I guess it ends up with: what is your time worth?

So if you have 15 users, pay $100/month? I suppose a senior engineer for Facebook wouldn't have a problem that. More seriously though > what is your time worth? What time are you talking about? If you're doing basic chat stuff on Zulip, and the free plan works, what exactly are you going to "maintain" that's worse than paying $1200 a year until you die - or until Slack decides decides they need revenue growth, so the…

If you are a company, then you have to move everyone over and they have to learn the new software, and Karen from accounting and others needs a lot of help switching and what the app on her phone. "The old one was much nicer", "I don't know Markdown". Now Karen hates the new system.

If you self-host then you have to pay for a server. That server needs updates and backups so that is even more time. A server on AWS can just disappear overnight, so you need to prepare for that.

And yet people still go to Starbucks and buy expensive coffee without thinking.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#199

Post by lazyasciiart »

carom wrote: post #68
insightcheck wrote: post #5

My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't changed. However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is supporting the headline's…

I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you instructions on some process then the next time you need it, it's gone.

argh, or worse yet: you search and find someone had the exact same issue! You click on the response to their thread and it says "oh yea this, I'll call/email/whisper the answer personally to avoid helping anyone else in future"

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#200

Post by armchairhacker »

icelancer wrote: post #162

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah for…

Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-wh...). They're also a lot faster and have less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots, though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a lot.
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