Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 790 posts

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

#571

Post by Kye »

bootsmann wrote: post #518
xyzzy123 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product. Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone on free slack is on free slack because they aren't willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for their competitors.

We can't assume someone who won't pay for Slack won't pay for the thing they move to. How many people do you think pay for Discord's paid features that never would have paid for the forums Discord killed? The almost $15 billion dollar valuation suggest a lot.

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

#572

Post by zaik »

deadbeef57 wrote: post #475

Big fan of Zulip here. Admittedly, I haven't used Zulip in the context of a company. But I'm a happy user of - leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages / week) - coq.zulipchat.com (~1200 messages / week) - categorytheory.zulipchat.com (~600 messages / week) as well as the quieter - isabelle.zulipchat.com - hott.zulipchat.com For research groups, it seems to work exceedingly well. The UI is unobtrusive, and values my…

I wish they would integrate an IRC or XMPP gateway per default. I know that #isabelle is visible in isabelle.zulipchat.com, but if the instance admin does not enable it, there's no way to participate using the standard IM protocols.

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

#573

Post by Kye »

bayindirh wrote: post #569
Kye wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they finally add exports bigger than 50 items to the new app? Last I checked, you still had to install the old one for a full export, and I don't expect it will work forever.

You can export a whole notebook by right clicking to notebook and selecting export. I don't think they have note limits on exporting notebooks.

The help doc says there's still a 50-note limit doing it from the note list, but they did finally add a full notebook export. Maybe I'll give it another try.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-Export...

The lack of a whole-account export is still an issue, but not as big as not being able to export notebooks.

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

#575

Post by YetAnotherNick »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #64

This 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…

Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.

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

#576

Post by mauvehaus »

soheil wrote: post #530
mstipetic wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this should be outlawed. So many industries destroyed by cheap vc money, and then trying to raise prices once everyone else is gone. You can lose money doing research all you want, but the moment you start interacting with the market there should be a time limit until you can get your unit economics to work, or get out.

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

Under certain circumstances, the IRS will consider your business a hobby if it fails to make a profit. The consequence being that you may no longer write off your business expenses on your taxes.

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

#577

Post by yrgulation »

nmcela wrote: post #412

I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands. 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…

The freemium model needs to die. Entitled “customers” that dont pay are pita and thanks to their mindset we end up with stuff like facebook and generally speaking an ad filled internet. Sorry for the tone but i’ve had it.

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

#578

Post by zarzavat »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #307
gernb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

There's something /off/ about discourse that I can't put my finger on. In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection. Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render fe…

I also have the same bad vibe with discourse.

For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.

I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.

The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.

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

#580

Post by mmcnl »

hnarn wrote: post #481
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…

Everybody understands this. Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off. You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the st…

I think if you are on a free tier and your business depends on it, you should anticipate for changes in said free tier. If you want guarantees, you need to be a paying customer.
Post reply on HN