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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

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

#271

Post by danpalmer »

ledauphin wrote: post #87
danpalmer wrote: post #63

While this is a slimy tactic from Slack, I doubt that organisations significantly under the 10k message limit over 90 days are actually benefitting from it. That’s 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack. Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long enough form that email or documents would be a better option. Slack is a lot…

I am sorry to report from the front lines that such users and use cases do, in fact, exist.

Sure, but are they getting more value out of slack? I’ve been in many slack channels that would be better as email, IM, or other formats. I feel like many jump on the slack bandwagon because it’s popular rather than critically evaluating it next to other options.

What do you feel it brings for these very small and low volume use-cases over alternatives?

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

#273

Post by esprehn »

turtlebits wrote: post #193
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.

We stopped using it as you said. TFA is all about how many people did that.

The money grab is in how they've gone about this. They made up an excuse about how this is better for users somehow (as discussed in the article as well). If they want to eliminate the free tier they should just do it.

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

#274

Post by zmmmmm »

Curious if this is the first sign of what are likely to be more aggressive monetisation changes coming from Salesforce. I'd say that if this is a sign of things to come, it's time to plan your exit if you are on the free tier even if you aren't affected by this change.

The good news is that Slack's success has bred a crop of much more free and open including self-hostable alternatives. It's a good time to check them out. Slack always was a bait and switch as a shallowly open but ultimately data-lockin play with a walled garden.

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

#275

Post by echelon »

xmprt wrote: post #246
joshspankit wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies): Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Sla…

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

Discord is way better than Slack for B2C if you're reaching that demographic.

I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too.

For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.

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

#276

Post by danielheath »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #267
gernb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination? It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just ge…

> Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?

Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.

They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.

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

#277

Post by SXX »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #152
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…

Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.

There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there.

Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.

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

#278

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

Well, what you said applies even if you are paying for something, if the price is unsustainable for the service provider at scale.

The real question you have to ask is, "is my use of this service providing a sustainable benefit for the owner". If not, you can guarantee it will go away or change eventually. If it is, it's probably OK even if its free. For example, I don't expect Google search to go away, even though it's free.

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

#279

Post by mikepurvis »

xmprt wrote: post #246
joshspankit wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies): Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Sla…

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

As a moderate user of both, they seem almost indistinguishable to me. Slack probably has more integration with productivity tools and a better auditing/compliance story, but it’s not at all obvious to me that Discord couldn’t become a drop in replacement.

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

#280

Post by monkpit »

systemvoltage wrote: post #67
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1529...
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