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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

#451

Post by ALittleLight »

dqpb wrote: post #285
echelon wrote: post #275

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.

If you join any cryptocurrency related Discords you can dial the random scammers up quite a bit.

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

#452

Post by rattray »

Test0129 wrote: post #237

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…

> The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly.

The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price. There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal community (especially if even only some members could not afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working - probably only $1-2.

Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages community feelings), etc. Yuck.

For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and personal value from. Important business and career networking, fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even close.

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

#454

Post by HatchedLake721 »

muppetman wrote: post #318
Test0129 wrote: post #237

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…

And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?

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

#455

Post by 02020202 »

JadoJodo wrote: post #21

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/c…

No post body was provided.

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

#456

Post by ivan_gammel »

LtWorf wrote: post #434
kristianc wrote: post #361

Earlier 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.

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 kno…

It is not that simple too. Tools used for reasons outside of work may not always be perceived as good tools for work. And tools used professionally are not always considered to be good for use for personal reasons. If someone have met Slack for the first time at their job, they may recommend it at their next job, because they associate it with work - this conversion channel is pretty clear and established. But the conversions workpersonal are not so obvious and may perform worse. I'm pretty sure Slack marketing team controls awareness part of the journey and they understand well their conversion funnel. Ditching some non-converting users is a bold move, but it may be worth it and it may fit well in whatever sales strategy Salesforce has in mind.

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

#457

Post by flohofwoe »

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…

On one hand that's true, on the other hand search is mostly about text data which has negligable storage size requirements (they could just say: we'll keep the search history for ever, but drop large binary blobs like images and videos after 90 days).

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

#459

Post by benreesman »

You've got to have a pretty sticky and/or differentiated product before you won't see a lot of price/feature sensitivity in the skew-small groups who would be affected by this.

Slack as a product is pretty good, but it's not wildly better than the other zillion messaging things. If you've got 10-100K people in your Slack, that's a high switching cost, but you're not using the free tier at that point.

I have Slack along with Signal and Telegram and Discord and iMessage and Google Meet and IRC and and and and... some people I need to talk to are on it.

But is it scratching any itch that I have as a small fry that isn't easily scratched elsewhere? Not really.

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

#460

Post by KhalPanda »

JadoJodo wrote: post #21

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/c…

I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.

The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.

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