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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

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

#431

Post by nine_k »

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…

Slack's leadership likely think that Slack is already so ingrained in corporate settings that people will go for it by default, without word of mouth from people using a free plan. There is enough word of mouth from people who used it on a previous job. Sort of like Jira.

I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.

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

#432

Post by MaKey »

LunaSea wrote: post #414
toastal wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

In this day and age that is simply not possible anymore. Most apps have no good open source alternatives.

Zulip is a pretty good open source alternative to Discord / Slack.

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

#433

Post by userbinator »

vlunkr wrote: post #151
userbinator wrote: post #29

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.

Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research. The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.

I did work at one company where the main means of communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were also available. Of course this was a company that specialised in networking and communications products, so perhaps they were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great experience.

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

#434

Post by LtWorf »

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.

It's not that simple.

People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to buy slack for work.

The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the employees requesting it.

Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack because of the employees.

But if the new employees will not even know slack exists… they will not be asking for it.

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

#435

Post by klelatti »

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…

Doesn’t have to be reality. Even when a firm is profitable and has scale it can still act as a funnel for new business.

It also helps to keep some competitors out. One less toehold for newcomers to get traction in a market. Just look at the comments on the recent Heroku announcement - how many will now consider an alternative option.

More likely management have lost interest in growth and are looking to squeeze as much out of the existing customer base as possible. Not usually a good sign for investors or users.

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

#436

Post by numpad0 »

marricks wrote: post #333
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…

Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and companies have been shoving them in our faces for decades. - "Free gigabytes of mail storage!" - "Free communication with your teams" - "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!" The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate…

Yes, and I believe the model is as follows:

- infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially;

- user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially;

- OpEx may increase, linearly;

- therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with astronomical wealth.

- and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual costs is pointless. Harmful even! We’re offering values, not collecting fees. We’re going for the moon! Forget about gases for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That’s irrelevant.

This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight. And now Houston is working on a solution.

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

#437

Post by rattray »

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…

GitHub is a good example of an enduringly useful (to the company) free tier.

Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.

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

#438

Post by throwaway14356 »

joshspankit wrote: post #299
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.

I might get backlash for this, but IRC (what all these platforms are emulating) handled channels pretty terribly also.

it's an old car that gets you places without breaking down

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

#439

Post by imron »

k099 wrote: post #210
quickthrower2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction! Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card. Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an…

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...

> I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious.

I think Brave has the right general idea.

Fund an account and then split that per month among the sites I visit, or according to a breakdown of my own preference.

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

#440

Post by LtWorf »

jmclnx wrote: post #188
userbinator wrote: post #29

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.

Yes, and searching history in slack is very painful, I have no use for history in slack, might as well delete it after 2 days. With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.

I normally use localslackirc (which I mostly wrote) https://github.com/ltworf/localslackirc to use slack.

I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.

I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.

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