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We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

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Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#21

Post by __jal »

dahart wrote: post #13

The 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 mak…

You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#22

Post by gizmo »

simonlc wrote: post #11
dusing wrote: post #6

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.

He wouldn't have paid $50,000 per year either. It's pretty obvious he signed up with the full intention of staying on the free version forever.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#23

Post by erelde »

__jal wrote: post #21
dahart wrote: post #13

The 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 mak…

You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.

Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#24

Post by onion2k »

Svip wrote: post #9
saas_sam wrote: post #7

Sounds 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?

There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup.

There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#27

Post by dpark »

vorpalhex wrote: post #17

I 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 hist…

Slack isn't intended for "friends". Their business model is clearly aimed at supporting teams inside businesses. $60 per head is absurd for a tool to chat with friends but pretty reasonable for a business that gets real value from the tool.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#28

Post by csomar »

Svip wrote: post #9
saas_sam wrote: post #7

Sounds 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 lacks a well designed UX that works cross platform (desktop cross os, mobile, web) and an easy API to integrate and play with other services like Github.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#29

Post by mabbo »

dahart wrote: post #13

The 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 mak…

If the authors expectations were higher than they ought to have been, that was because the Slack marketing team set them so high.
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