The cloud is other people's computers.
Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#312I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up. It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bit…
Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business. If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time. I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it. But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sy…
I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#313Do not use Slack.
A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst.
But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.
The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?
IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#314Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing.
Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#315should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
Just more of the same
No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#316What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.
I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.
If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#317This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal…
Because microsoft would never do such a thing
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#318We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version). I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?
I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances. You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team? Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-…
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#319TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#320There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance? I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing…
>maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance? I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to inclu…
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)