Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

Anything self hosted you pay twice. You pay for the infrastructure and you pay for the time lost setting things up. Engineers are really bad at time estimates and they'll argue it's easy and not a big deal. And then they'll end up spending hours/days on it, which by their hourly wages means you are getting a much worse deal than a paid service. And even if you are saving some money, you are still losing time that you might have used more productively.

And if you cut corners and don't do a proper job of self hosting, you are going to pay a third time when it inevitably blows up and needs more time and attention to be fixed; all while your company has no access to whatever the thing was you were self hosting. I've seen Jira go down, self hosted gitlab servers running out of disk (without backups), irc servers go down, jenkins build servers blowing up, etc. Very disruptive when that happens. And preventable if you do a proper job. But that costs extra and you need competent people to be on this. People that could be doing more valuable things instead.

We use freemium accounts Github and Slack. So, we have Github Actions, issue tracking, chat, etc. without actually paying a single dollar. Github actually used to charge and the company I was CTO for at the time was happily paying for it (we upgraded from our self hosted Gitlab because I got tired of dealing with that). But then they removed the limitations on private repositories. So, these days, using Github and Slack for free is kind of a no-brainer for me. I'd consider paying for this stuff even but there simply is no need currently and the added value of the paid only features just isn't that high to me.

MS did what Slack should be doing. They realized that the value of being the number 1 choice for a commodity service is that you end up with an insanely valuable thing: every developer joins your service. They have Linus Torvalds hosting the Linux kernel on Github even. The percentile of developers without a Github account is ridiculously low. And their dominance as the number 1 choice in the corporate world is huge because of that. And there are plenty of ways to monetize being that large other than asking companies to pay per month per user. As soon as they'd force companies to pay, they'd inevitably open up the market to competitors and lose their dominant position. Gitlab is the obvious one. But it is merely the largest of a very long tail of alternatives. As long as MS keeps their pricing as it is, they get to keep their position.

Slack is dominating corporate chat in a way that MS never really achieved despite trying very hard with various products. However, chat is a commodity and Slack succeeded in on-boarding lots of companies and teams by giving it away for free. As soon as it stops being free, people will vote with their feet because there are plenty of other free/cheap options. They should prevent that at all cost and focus on finding better ways to convert some of their users to paid users. Shrinking their user base is counter productive for that.

I was using Slack to manage notes on my personal research projects. I never used any features besides channels, messages, and search. I loved it's UI, rich-text features, accessibility, and reliability. Amount of workspace messages after 5 years is 1154. Besides that, I'm using Slack's business+ plan in the corporate teams I'm leading.

Again needing to migrate from a once great app that's now getting ruined by Salesforce, again with no complete export features available, I start feeling ridiculed.

Zulip looks promising, and they even support good imports from Slack. However, their UI just feels too cluttered with all those borders around messages, and their rich-text support isn't as convenient as Slack's.

A majority of my team members felt the same, and we decided to spend a day for hosting an internal contest to build a basic alternative to Slack that we happily migrated our personal workspaces to.

What Slack could've done better: - Saving money at other places than the most critical one for backwards compatibility, message retention - Store messages locally, instead of on their servers - Offer complete exports - Don't advertise this change as "beneficial for free users" - As a last resort, offer one-time payments instead of a per-user subscription model

Not to mention 1Password

Do you have integrated collab apps too ?

So you're suggesting any startup that can't get its unit economics to work should have its founders sent to jail?