411–420 of 790 posts
From a business perspective, this makes perfectly good sense.
We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.
So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Most apps have no good open source alternatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My experience is that discord is basically just a vector for scammers to directly message me.
I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If not, then you have your own freeloader p…
My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan things, talk etc etc. It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old. I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a…
Being able to go back through two years of chats with your wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack. For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to.
I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though. While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing. It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.
Yeah, don't recommend something you have no control over DONT DO IT....EVER!!!
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.
The 90 day cap on the search history essentially turns the free plan into a time-limited trial. Slack is probably happy to part ways with whoever still cannot justify their subscription price after that time. They will have figured that these users are not likely to upgrade to a paid tier at a later date either. As a for-profit entity, Slack has no reason to offer a free service to a longtail of non-paying users. Fro…
There's also a lost opportunity in not selling these users a subscription at a lower price. Products like Gmail partly succeeded because that's what people used at home, so they wanted to use something equally good at work.
If you push users towards alternative in their private life, you risk that they want to bring new product into work.
IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.