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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

#741

Post by nmcela »

tebbers wrote: post #605
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…

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.

I am their paying customer.

I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.

I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.

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

#742

Post by nmcela »

jorl17 wrote: post #694
Gatsky wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment.

While I agree with the sentiment that external dependencies are a risk, why should this be the top comment? This person was having a service for free, having the possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an absurd mentality? If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free…

I am/was their paying customer but I already explained that in the other comment.

My point was that I'm tired of not being able to trust any SaaS company long term. The service generally only gets worse over time, and then your data is at risk. So I decided I'm not gonna take any more chances with these and just try hosting everthing I need myself. So far so good.

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

#743

Post by ukyrgf »

Aeolun wrote: post #113
systemvoltage wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

Reading their latest announcement makes me question how alive they are. Feels like an announcement from 5 years ago.

Yeah I actually thought about using it for a project for a second, but they're praising how it now uses PHP7, recaptcha 2, Symfony 3...

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

#744

Post by akamaozu »

minusSeven wrote: post #614
chrisseaton wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will piss people off Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything. It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.

>It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't. Bullshit. It's unclear communication and indecisiveness that pisses people off. If you can't afford it, there is no reason for you to give something for free and then later take it away. People who are paying will feel that samething will happen to them in other ways. You want consistency.

You would prefer to never get a thing for free rather than have it at no cost for a brief period in time?

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

#745

Post by nmcela »

tomrod wrote: post #582
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…

Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd love to self-host in the mid-term.

Not yet, but that's on my todolist. I recommend this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.

After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.

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

#746

Post by neop1x »

An example of the company making the world better (for its investors):

1. Destroy low-maintenance forums and IRC (often fully owned by their owners) by providing 'better' and more convenient services, let them 'own' a virtual channel and a promise (no public history in order to force the creation of more accounts, paid for by investors but that's a detail)

2. discontinue or make free plans unusable in order to force users to pay and bring investors huge profits

3. sell the company and live your life, laughing at the stupidity of the users who now have no history and no money

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

#747

Post by GekkePrutser »

watwut wrote: post #704
TheFlyingFish wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 quic…

Teams eclipsed them, because they are by Microsoft. For business people who do make these decisions, they are serious product, they integrate with office, unlike weird things like slack or discord or what have you. And it is free, so.

It also works so much worse than Slack.

But I agree, in the eyes of the business suits this doesn't matter at all as long as it ticks boxes on a spec sheet.

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

#748

Post by GekkePrutser »

klibertp wrote: post #655
TheGeminon wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Discord data mines their users to hell and back and even scans your computer. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_d...

It has no business being the default chat of open source projects. Especially when there's something amazing and fully free like Matrix.

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

#749

Post by GekkePrutser »

madeofpalk wrote: post #671
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…

> if you promote your product through a loss leader To be fair, I don't think Slack ever actually did this. Slack has always been pretty terrible for semi-public communities, and I don't think they did anything to promote this. Free slack has always had pretty annoying retention and storage limits, and others like limits on how many integrations you can add. I think Slack's problem has been that reasonably (at least…

I know many public communities that use slack. A major one is MacAdmins which is legendary. Some even get sponsored by them (get free access to all features). Like MacAdmins. But many don't.

The problem is that the per-user model is really crap for public communities.

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