ffs just use IRC. Not proprietary. You can host it yourself. All your base are belong to… yourself.
Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
371–380 of 790 posts
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#372This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click. I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely…
To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.
Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.
Transport of data was at that time trivial.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#373People 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…
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 Slack-fluent friend.
So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather those made by massive sales teams.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#374Please understand that Zulip is nightmare software and it's absolutely not a replacement for useful productivity team software. Zulip is a joke (and an unfunny joke at that) for so many reasons. I've worked at three companies that tried and abandoned Zulip, all for good reason.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#375HACK: If you want to save all of your current slack messages, sign up for https://orbit.love , connect it to slack, and then grab the messages from the API. Not sure how much longer this will work, it takes time and they may catch on. I do like Orbit as a user, still a relatively new product
As I was reading your message my brain inserted a second step, where you use a slack bot / api to reinject all the messages back into slack, but with today's date.
Unlimited storage; 90 day retention! Whee!
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#376How does Slack make money off the free plan? If they don't, I don't see that anyone has any business complaining about any changes they make to it whatsoever
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#377Gen F? People who demand free stuff and complain like babies instead of building a solution based on an existing docker image in 1 day
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#378Earlier 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…
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 Slack-fluent friend. So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outsid…
This is not my experience. But don’t take my word for it.
Why else do you think students get software or checking accounts for free or much lower cost? The net LTV of getting users accustomed to your product who later evangelize it for free is priceless.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 consolidati…
This. Companies should be charged, sure; but an upside of Slack is that I can use various tech community’s Slack, the union’s Slack, and the coworking’s Slack in the same app.
None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I like that in Discord you can choose to spin off the conversation into a separate thread, or you can reply within the main chat and it quotes the comment you’re replying to (and the quote is clickable) in order to see context. You can’t do the latter in slack, and it’s easy to not realize that others have started a thread when it’s above the fold.