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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

#341

Post by toastal »

echelon wrote: post #275
xmprt wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I understand that approach EF going Discord-forward, it's one that's prevented me from joining many circles now as I've pledged to take my data privacy more seriously and proprietary apps aren't it. I hope you offer at least one alternative (but if you're not targeting open-source users or privacy advocates, there likely wouldn't be a difference).

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

#342

Post by nirui »

> Instead of a 10,000-message limit and 5 GB of storage, we are giving full access to the past 90 days of message history and file storage.

This limit sounded reasonable. In fact, I would rather set such limit myself to prevent leaks (for example, my Telegram account is set to delete if I'm inactive for 60 days).

IMO, private chat message SHOULD be temporary by default, and made persistent only if user decides to achieve it. I also don't use chat services to share my PPTs/PDF/other files in general, there are way better place to do such thing than in an IM.

As long as Slack don't delete my account and chat rooms (and it's settings), it's fine by me.

Also... Smart move, Zulip

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

#343

Post by techsin101 »

joshspankit wrote: post #208
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…

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…

dark ages of A/B driven blindness

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

#344

Post by techsin101 »

raydev wrote: post #329
samstave wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.

it's becoming tiktok slowly

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

#345

Post by Vardiak »

3np wrote: post #144
sushid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.

Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so. Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.

I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits.

Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.

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

#346

Post by p1esk »

chillfox wrote: post #287
xmprt wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish we used Discord for work. It’s superior to Slack, MS Teams and googles chat thing by far.

How is Discord superior to Slack?

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

#347

Post by californical »

rtpg wrote: post #234
domador wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all…

low volume users unprepared to pay anything to Slack ever are low value users. There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community" slacks

I use Slack’s free version in a 2-person workspace with just my partner. We use it to message each other during the day. It probably costs Slack almost nothing, but now we’re getting somewhat cut-off.

I’ve also advocated for Slack at my company of several hundred employees, at multiple previous companies, and would’ve continued to at future companies. Mostly because they’ve had goodwill and been a joy to use in my personal life.

But now I’m mad at them, and going to move to a new chat platform, with my partner, on our tiny little instance.

Will me being mad at Slack affect their bottom line? Probably not today… but when more people like me have moved past Slack and see it as old annoying tech, maybe it’ll start to have an affect. We’ll see.

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

#348

Post by viraptor »

domador wrote: post #232
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…

The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all…

The pricing step is crazy. There's no way it matches the expense from Slacks side, but I guess they're just saying "you're not our target market" by charging that much per user.

The weird thing is that if that's the case, their target market doesn't really need a free tier at all - maybe a time limited demo. So I expect more restrictions in the future.

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

#349

Post by googlryas »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #116
Melatonic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful

In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?

It happens if a niche reddit has a popular post and makes it near the front page. Or, someone makes a post that gets the attention of one of the brigading subs(even if mods remove post as soon as they see it, it might be too late). Usually the sub will have an influx of low quality posts/shitposts for a while after that.

Also, not subreddit-subreddit, but multiplex times, posts of mine got reported to admins for hate speech because I said "retarder" in a mechanical focused subreddit, and I suppose they don't care to take the time to realize it's a perfectly fine piece of technology and not an ableist slur before sending out threats of banning you forever from the site.

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

#350

Post by egKYzyXeIL »

Aeolun wrote: post #138
xen2xen1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I have to ask, why use Slack for hobby things instead of Discord? Is that driven by people used to having it at work? I'm confused by the thought of "hobby Slack channels".

Discord is actually fairly annoying because so many things are on Discord and split between servers.

I don't understand the point of your comment. How is it annoying that different interest groups are separated from each other? Reddit is split into different subredits, IRC is split into different servers and channels, forums do the same thing, I could go on. Would you rather everything be jumbled together in one place?
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