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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

#751

Post by addicted »

So many smaller companies I know paying for Slack are doing so because their employees used free versions of Slack in some form or the other so recommended it as the first choice, as opposed to Teams, or other alternatives.

If the employees were agnostic about the choice, it’s highly likely that many of these companies’ IT departments would choose Teams instead, because MS is certainly more company friendly (and its bundles tend to be cheaper).

I think Slack may end up regretting losing these non paying customers, who usually end up being their biggest and only cheerleaders in paying contexts.

The other problem for Slack is this decision makes open source alternatives more popular which means more users of the open source alternatives which would likely lead to more maintainers and developers for those projects, leading to them becoming increasingly competitive with Slack. That would squeeze Slack from all sides, with MS hitting them from the enterprise end and these alternatives from the open source end.

It would be difficult for a company to justify paying Slacks high prices when they have all these options instead.

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

#752

Post by miragecraft »

webmobdev wrote: post #739
watwut wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One obvious difference is that hairdressers don't run around yelling "free haircuts we will give you free haircuts look at us how we give away free haircuts". What the companies are doing here is that they are trying to kill paid competition, hold on longer and raise prices once competitors don't exists. They really dont have a standing to complain about situation they themselves created in the hope that competition…

> Now, this analogy does not work at all, because going by the painting in the museum in no way implies you would want it at home. You are talking from a buyer's perspective (the museum visitor) whereas he is talking from the seller's perspective (the museum / artist). The seller hopes that by allowing you free or cheap access to the art, you may be tempted to buy a copy of it or some memento of it (which is one of t…

That’s not how marketing works for luxury products (such as fine art), the free/cheap access to see the art is to raise awareness so that they will be impressed by people who actually owns the art.

It increases prestige and pride of ownership for actual buyers.

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

#753

Post by madeofpalk »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #749
madeofpalk wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Many use it in spite of Slack's attitude towards the free tier.

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

#754

Post by miragecraft »

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…

I’m not convinced running your own service is cheaper than paid solutions in general, if Slack can provide the same service for cheaper than it should be considered even if it’s no longer free.

I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).

However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.

Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.

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

#755

Post by webmobdev »

miragecraft wrote: post #752
webmobdev wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, this analogy does not work at all, because going by the painting in the museum in no way implies you would want it at home. You are talking from a buyer's perspective (the museum visitor) whereas he is talking from the seller's perspective (the museum / artist). The seller hopes that by allowing you free or cheap access to the art, you may be tempted to buy a copy of it or some memento of it (which is one of t…

That’s not how marketing works for luxury products (such as fine art), the free/cheap access to see the art is to raise awareness so that they will be impressed by people who actually owns the art. It increases prestige and pride of ownership for actual buyers.

He was not talking about fine arts but citing one of the business models of some museum. Museums don't sell their historical artefacts. You can't buy the Mona Lisa, but you can buy a print of it. And this is how some museums try to make extra cash.

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

#756

Post by joshspankit »

GuB-42 wrote: post #599
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.

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 an…

> IRC ... but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.

Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off

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

#757

Post by cortesoft »

woofcat wrote: post #719
cortesoft wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this proposed law work? I am really curious how you would word a law to enforce this.

Isn't there already laws against established companies using their market position to price under cost to cut out competition?

There are laws against 'dumping', which is selling goods at a loss to drive out competitors, but those are fairly narrow in scope. It would be hard to enforce a more general restriction on not being profitable.

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

#758

Post by soundnote »

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…

> The latest Google Apps fiasco

What did they do now?

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

#759

Post by matchagaucho »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #502
matchagaucho wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Heroku's case, it could be argued the free users were a net-negative liability, causing service outages, DNS issues, etc...

What? Those free users are practically providing free infrastructure testing. Those low-no profit margins are hiding a lot of stuff underneath. Intel and Cloudflare are famous for reaching scale by using cheap/free end of the market to expand and solidify their positions.

Speaking more to the torrent and zombie bot farms, and the abuse of free dynos.

For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.

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

#760

Post by ordiel »

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…

I agree with your comment, but most importantly, I hope (tho I know it won't happen) this helps people to open their eyes and realize the importance of self hosting their own stuff, I could understand that maybe 10 years ago it wasn't just as easy but now days if you are trully a small team or one with very low transit you can host your stuff even on a Raspberry PI and it would not be more expensive than permanently keeping a light bulb on besides granting you tons of flexibility. I mean, if you are less than 10 people you can even use that same hardware to keep a IM server and possibly a simple web page or some other application of interest, honestly that's what you get for being too cheap
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