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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

#591

Post by freddie_mercury »

oblio wrote: post #290
freddie_mercury wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?

The Ancient Roman one. The one most people use. SWIFT. And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of the world's business is happening there and like the crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-banked".

SWIFT isn't remotely suitable for micropayments. Most banks have to go through a correspondent bank that is going to charge at least $5 per transfer.

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

#592

Post by megous »

Teckla wrote: post #100
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.

IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.

Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and corresponding lack of client side history logging)

Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.

There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).

With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.

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

#593

Post by mstipetic »

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?

Not too jail, where did I mention jail? Stop selling and messing up the market, just shut it down and go do something else that creates value

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

#595

Post by EamonnMR »

lmeyerov wrote: post #548

We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in general. Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for a good competitor to knock them out f…

Good free IRC on mobile would be killer.

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

#596

Post by tyingq »

pid-1 wrote: post #547
hnarn wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed? My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay for services) start adopting a product. It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last forever.

>Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed?

I think a fair amount of their actual sales come from non-tech companies reluctantly paying for it because their developers are pushy about wanting it. Those developers want it because they were exposed to it in some context where it was free.

Lacking that pressure, those companies will just tell their developers to use something they already have...MS Teams or whatever.

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

#597

Post by paulgb »

mmcnl wrote: post #580
hnarn wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, but what's happening here is largely not businesses behind the exodus, but loose organizations like open source communities.

You could argue that these are freeloaders and not Slack's problem, but I'd be wary about sending so many users running into the arms of their competition. Part of the appeal of Slack was that I could use one app for everything, which is increasingly not the case.

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

#598

Post by darthrupert »

einherjae wrote: post #427
darthrupert wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has the worst ux of any chat software I have ever used, fwiw. There's a fascinating race to the bottom in this area.

MS Teams? Skype 4 Business? IRC? Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.

Okay, for the first two. I didn't think of those as actual non-joke options.

About IRC you're obviously wrong :)

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

#599

Post by GuB-42 »

darthrupert wrote: post #359
xmprt wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

Discord has the worst ux of any chat software I have ever used, fwiw. There's a fascinating race to the bottom in this area.

What chat software do you use? I find Discord to be among the best when it comes to UX. Not perfect (and it is still an Electron app) but when you have atrocities like MS Teams, it passes off as good.

In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.

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

#600

Post by ghaff »

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…

>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.

I'd argue that most companies understand that perfectly well. They have a generous free tier to drive growth. Once that growth is attained and demand starts to level off, it's time to trim the resources devoted to free and force users (to greater or lesser degrees) to either start paying or go use someone else. There's great wailing and gnashing of teeth for some period of time on HN, Twitter, etc. but life moves on.

It's a pretty predictable playbook. See also Heroku of late. It should probably also come as no surprise we're seeing a number of examples of this going on at the moment.

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