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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

#651
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…

You're not a customer, you don't pay for the product. If you want to be treated like a customer, then pay for the product. This entitlement mindset is extraordinary. Slack was literally paying for you to use their product. Regardless, it sounds like you're happy with your move.

Even if you pay for the product, using SaaS products VS hosting your own software, still puts you under someone else's control. The feature you really needed from them, might be decided that it should be removed, because only 1% of the total users actually used it, and you'll have no recourse.

This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where each user can run their own version.

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

#653
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…

> 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. This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people will be pissed off but yo…

If those companies had a shred of integrity and respect for their customers, they would be upfront about such plans. Without a roadmap, user trust will eventually be shattered by step 2. Most people understand this shell game, and they will put up with it if they know what to expect.

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's irc with the ability to share files and pin stuff to channels :) Felt extremely natural to me from day one. Except threads. Threads are useless.

> Except threads. Threads are useless. That might exactly be my problem with Slack, and Google Chat as well. I understand the desire to wanting to some sort of threading, but it doesn't work in either programs. Instead it just confuses the interface greatly. Slack is super weird, because you can have a thread open, and navigate around, so the thread view is now completely out of context.

I think the problem is not with threads themselves but with Slack's implementation. Threads provide a much-needed way of creating a discussion around a specific topic that doesn't pollute the main channel. In Slack they seem like more of an afterthought than a primary communication tool.

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

#655
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't know if it is their intention, but this is probably more of a cost-cutting measure than a revenue-increasing one (or maybe even a technical one, with their data strategy/partitioning it may be much easier to do everything time-based). Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free t…

What's wrong with Discord? Most of the projects I want to follow have Discord server, often connected with an IRC channel. I miss a few features from Slack, but in general I'm happy with Discord. It's still free from what I can see. So, what happened to make "OSS projects" etc. to stop using Discord? (Honestly asking, I don't follow Discord itself at all)

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

#656
post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention 1Password

I want a password manager to be paid.

Yeah grounds for a suit. Unless of course they don't fuck up, that's a different story, then no suit and payment will be forthcoming. Like a bank. Password managers are banks.

Subscriptions are highly fetishized by the current accounting system, because they seem more predictable basically, and plus there's a lag between no longer using a service and discountinuing the subscription, that's like four free months at the end with no support calls no use no opening the app, nothing. Not even electricity costs. For that user in those months you might as well have 0% uptime. It's cheap. Except billing because you keep getting paid! And when they leave it's generally not a chargeback, plus you can be a bitch to unsubscribe from to the narrowest extent permitted by the law, ask Google not to lead people to the answer to how to unsubscribe on the first try or SEO it, in some way, hey that's solid business plusses and minusses. Especially the plusses for the first-person, the business owner, the first-person in economics too, for whom the price and quantity axes on economics charts are switched. There's also the idea that for a business to be a business it has to be repeatable. It's a sound idea.

And there's tons of businesses that make sense as a subscription. If you want to reward a business for doing a great job, try to subscribe to it under some pretense because that revenue will go much farther in business terms to strengthen it. I've done that, I did that for Beorg. I already bought all their unlockables. Even the ones I didn't want. Tipped them (him? I think it's a one-man show) a bunch of times. Then I subscribed thinking of all the good that subscription would do for the startup, instead of eg tipping.

Then it broke and I couldn't use it, like the calendars got out of whack. Plus, it's a todo app, ie I nag myself with it. It's like an alarm clock. There's the alarm clock effect.

Alarm clock effect: no matter what song you choose for your alarm clock, Beethoven's 9th the Beatle's biggest hit ("Yesterday" I think it is), any song any any song: in a week you will hate it. If it's your alarm song you will hate it. Hatred. Somethings are beloved, this is behated. I think it takes one year of not hearing it in any context to recover from it for every single time it wakes you up early. It's all in the interest of not getting fired for 8 more hours or not getting denied from an institution. Protects against existential threat of sleeping in.

Agendas are similar. And password protectors are similar. Existential threats. But in the case of password protection, I don't want a subscription, then what happens when I can't pay? Basically lock me out of everything, either explicitly or with hexes or nags or giving me a longer and longer runaround every time, slowbanning me, that kinda shit. For password protection, it needs to be one-and-done or work for some long event horizon, like ten or twenty years.

Especially because of the intricate relationship between cryptography and torture, in the endgame. If your crypto is strong and the bad guys are still determined to get your information the only option is to torture you. Elite cryptographers talk about this all the time.

So any half-assed password manager has to be really strong in that scenario. And it was, I bought 1Password in 2008 I think and it worked great, I felt very secure despite getting hacked by amnestic interrogation, which I had no idea of for like a decade. 1Password of 2009 failed only under torture. That is the exact unique kind of next-level shit that is a legitimate situation for a password manager to fail.

1password is basically a bank. A password bank. They should act like a bank instead of acting like I don't know patreon dancer.

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

#657
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…

They should make an exception for low volume/infrequent users. Yes free-tier power users should get incentive to level up. But if you have a slack with your spouse for house ideas where you post a few times a year, I think this is the type of user that gets the most pissed off by limits, because leveling up to the paid tier for a few messages a year seems like a ripoff/moneygrab.

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

#658
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.

There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there. Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.

Good to know

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

#659
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…

That makes sense. It was a race to the bottom. Now we're at the bottom. It's like 2001 in a lot of ways. Spesh the terrible economics of websites, or apps, or call them almost whatever they want, platforms, anything. Giveaways bring users. Free beer people show up. Like there's no business here. No excludability. It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck of a cent for, and now they want to…

>It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck of a cent for

It's a lot more than that. Addimg a persistent message history and multi-device identities to IRC is pretty huge, otherwise bouncers would never have existed.

And the number of paying customers shows that people are, in fact, very willing to pay for it. Slack just really sucks at b2b marketing, which is why Teams eclipsed them so quickly.

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

#660
post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except threads. Threads are useless. That might exactly be my problem with Slack, and Google Chat as well. I understand the desire to wanting to some sort of threading, but it doesn't work in either programs. Instead it just confuses the interface greatly. Slack is super weird, because you can have a thread open, and navigate around, so the thread view is now completely out of context.

I think the problem is not with threads themselves but with Slack's implementation. Threads provide a much-needed way of creating a discussion around a specific topic that doesn't pollute the main channel. In Slack they seem like more of an afterthought than a primary communication tool.

Yeah, they're very hard to find when you just quickly check where you're needed.
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