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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

#361

Post by kristianc »

joshstrange wrote: post #281
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…

It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.

I would say they are acutely aware of the sales funnel. They weren’t making any money from those users who were ‘happily using Slack’s free tier for years’ and neither was there any prospect of converting them into paid users in the coming years. Very little point in keeping users (and paying to maintain them) who are going to be perpetually at the top of the funnel.

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

#362

Post by onion2k »

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…

A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product.

Or to stop people moving to a competing product in order to stifle competitors.

Or to leverage a network effect to grow the user base to support investment.

Or because the company simply believes their product should be accessible for free.

Using a 'freemium' model is a common approach to revenue growth but it isn't the only reason for a free tier to exist.

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

#363

Post by rtpg »

californical wrote: post #347
rtpg wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Sure, I get the theory. My glib response is that I do not believe a business tool kicking out "freeloaders" (in the nicest sense of the term) is a factor to me using it for a business. Why would I care? I want a communication tool for a business! Having to pay for loss leading is annoying!

Free tiers exist to help with onboarding and testing, the existence of free plans that allow more or less indefinite usage is an obvious mistake for something like Slack IMO.

I think if Slack had shown up with a free plan at 90 days history (really, 90 days/5 GB would be the "reall" thing), then people wouldn't bat an eye. It feels obvious that the solution here would be to grandfather old workspaces into the old model but .. shrug.

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

#364

Post by jbverschoor »

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 there was this episode of I think a16z, where initially they used the free accounts in their numbers (around, churn, etc). But later around those to marketing and cac instead.

All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed

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

#365

Post by MattRix »

iratewizard wrote: post #339
galangalalgol wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you rate mattermost and zulip compared to slack and discord? I've only used slack, mattermost and skype. Of those I prefer mattermost by a fair margin, but I'm still not sure I like it. It seems like the ui could be better. Something about the way both it and slack handle channels or groups feels clunky.

Guilded over discord in my opinion. More features like forums in a channel. Long term, I only see discord and their company culture turning it into twitch or other zealot infested dumps.

Discord has forum channels already: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

(they’re technically in beta but a bunch of popular discords use them)

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

#366

Post by icelancer »

cheald wrote: post #308
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…

We tried it, I even made some contributions trying to get it to work. In the end we just migrated to Mattermost, which speaks Slack webhooks natively and is a very competent Slack replacement. We self-host it, too, which is a big win.

Huh, that's pretty enticing. Unfortunately last time I set up Mattermost it exploded on a VPS so that wasn't too good...

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

#367

Post by hedora »

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.

I thought the only selling point of slack was that your chat history was archived and searchable.

Oh well. Time for the industry to move on.

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

#368

Post by xyzzy123 »

kristianc wrote: post #361
joshstrange wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.

I would say they are acutely aware of the sales funnel. They weren’t making any money from those users who were ‘happily using Slack’s free tier for years’ and neither was there any prospect of converting them into paid users in the coming years. Very little point in keeping users (and paying to maintain them) who are going to be perpetually at the top of the funnel.

I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert?

Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidating in a single client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.

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

#369

Post by onion2k »

Do you think most Slack teams on the free plan are active enough to send 10,000 messages every 90 days? That’s 111 messages every single day, or 156 every weekday!

Maybe my team uses Slack too much, but that doesn't sound like very much to me. We have 11 devs, and a few non-dev roles, across 8 channels and we must be sending at least 500 messages in total on a busy day, and I doubt it's ever less than a couple of hundred. If I include the JIRA, CI, and bug reporting integrations it's far higher. We pay for Slack but this would be a good change for us if we didn't.

This is also a good time to point out that Slack conversations are not documentation. If you're losing access to important things because you can't go back more than 90 days in your chat history then you need a better knowledge capture process. Recognise when important information has been shared in chat, especially in a private chat, and put it somewhere that's easy for the whole team to access and that you know will still be available in a couple of years time. You won't regret it.

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