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Slack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the s

Slack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they'll all dump the free plans and we won't be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It's not like we can't pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I'd hope so.

snug 11y ago
I don't see this happening. Free plans like this will typically help build better products to sell to the actual paying customers, or even help with bug fixes. I don't see them removing their free model.
Klathmon 11y ago
We found the current slack pricing to be way too expensive for us, but if/when they add video conferencing that equation changes drastically. Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...
- AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
  Slack has a pretty nice integration with appear.in. It's a free in-browser video conferencing service. We've used it with Slack very effectively in the past!
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    That looks nice, but we need more than 8 participants. We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.
    - austinsharp 11y ago
      Entirely remote startup employee here: we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people and we use Sococo[1] for all our audio and video. The office layout is also really nice. Everything else we've tried for video hasn't cut it, in comparison. Note that Sococo will try to push you to their new browser based product. Last time we tried it, it was far worse than the 'classic' version we still use. But they don't really show 'classic' on their website anymore. [1] https://www.sococo.com/ https://www.sococo.com/
      - a_small_island 11y ago
        >we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people That sounds horrible.
        Klathmon 11y ago
        (I'm not the guy you replied to but...) It's not bad when everyone knows what they are doing. You get the occasional feedback screech or something, but for the most part we aren't animals and we all know how to mute our mic's. And the added benefit of a face means you can get more body-language which helps prevent the "talking over" that happens on conference calls. Plus the way we have it setup now we can all "mute" one another, so if someone is causing an issue and doesn't know it (or stepped away for a second) we can instantly mute them and move on.
        a_small_island 11y ago
        So it's like a webinar scenario where only 1 or 2 principals or are all present supposed to participate?
        Klathmon 11y ago
        No we are all participating, but we only talk one at a time mostly. It works surprisingly similar to a real meeting. Someone runs it, and everyone else participates when they need to.
- ihuman 11y ago
  Discord, a Slack competitor, is planning on adding video calls https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends-list/ https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends...
  - mbilker 11y ago
    Though Discord is targeted towards gaming. I use both and found there are differences that are important, especially in the realm of notifications, themeing, and integration with other services.
    - andkenneth 11y ago
      Yeah discord really isn't even suitable for gaming community staff, it's really best as a gathering place for your team/clan/community rather than a place to get real work done. We still use slack for admins/devs/other staff. One of my biggest complaints is the lack of easy to manage private channels. There's a super complex and powerful permissions system quite obviously based on mumble, but if I want to make a quick private channel to talk to two people, it's easier to make a whole new server than just another channel.
      - jhgg 11y ago
        Group chats are coming soon that will allow you to do this quickly & easily.
- koolba 11y ago
  > Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan... In comparison to a free plan sure but in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? That's less than an hour's minimum wage[1]. [1]: Technically it's quite a bit less as min wage in the U.S. is $7.25 and that doesn't include corporate payroll tax or medicare/social-security matching
  - justJanne 11y ago
    > in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
    - koolba 11y ago
      > The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers? None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B). In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
      - justJanne 11y ago
        Yes, they aren't for-profit entities. But they still require history, easy to use chat systems, easy integration into Dev systems, etc. That's what was better about IRC: you can self-host and get all of slacks features for very cheap.
        tempestn 11y ago
        And you still can, right? There are still plenty of alternatives for those who can't or don't want to pay for Slack.
kiloreux 11y ago
Have you ever considered switching to Hipchat ?
- dntrkv 11y ago
  In addition to the rest of the comments, HipChat doesn't handle file uploads nearly as well, the message formatting is a joke, message history randomly gets erased, simple things like posting a YouTube link in Slack will embed the actual video, you can edit message in Slack (HipChat has that silly "s/word/replace" feature). I use both on a daily basis and Slack is just better in every way.
- thechut 11y ago
  We are also switching to Slack from Hipchat due to bad downtime and messed up apps. Too bad, because it use to be decent...
  - knodi123 11y ago
    Us too. Downtime and bugs. Recently hipchat released a major UI rewrite, and now there's no way to turn off autocorrect. It's almost useless for developers discussing code, if every technical term you type gets replaced with the first non-technical word that is "close enough."
    - marcins 11y ago
      I am assuming you're on OS X? You can right-click on the input field, and under "Spelling & Grammar" you can turn off auto-correct. This is an OS feature, not something HipChat specific.
      - knodi123 11y ago
        weird. wonder why this OS feature got turned on in the rewrite, but wasn't in the old version? Thanks for the tip!
- mastacow 11y ago
marcog1 11y ago
I work at Asana. There's no way we'll drop our free plan. It's too fundamental to our sales model. We are, however, thinking a lot more actively about what features to make premium. Largely new features we haven't released yet.
- dave2000 11y ago
  We're definitely not getting rid of the free plan. Well, not until current management leaves, we do badly, get greedy, get bought out...
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Yeah, jerk! Answer for your unknowable future! "No way", indeed... the temerity, to suggest their product will be free after the heat death of the universe.
    - JabavuAdams 11y ago
      Your response seems like an unnecessary escalation. I thought the post you're responding to was reasonable.
      - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
        I'm pretty sure it's a joke.
        striking 11y ago
        Jokes and other forms of amusement are banned on HN. It's been found that people here take things way too seriously, so the mods decided to ban jokes and humor outright. (Happy April 1st!)
        JabavuAdams 11y ago
        You know, I've had my share of rants, etc. on HN but revisiting Reddit has made me appreciate the HN policies more. I generally avoid Reddit these days, except occasionally dipping into the VR sub-reddits. The level of stupidity, entitlement, and general melodrama is ludicrous. It's like when you're subjected to the nonsense of a person who's become accustomed to being the smartest person in a dumb room. HN is just a smarter room. Like Reddit 10 years ago. We should defend that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jjawssd 11y ago
Dumped Slack for self-hosted Mattermost. Gets the job done.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  How is Mattermost to operate? Is it basically spin up and run or does it require some active maintenance?
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Pretty hands-off. We've been running it a few weeks without much work(I had webhooks reset when instance rebooted but that was about it).
  - educar 11y ago
    Well, almost every server requires maintenance. My previous companies had dedicated sysadmins even for jira. Those servers were not even internet facing. Have a look at cloudron.io (cloud servers) or protonet (on premise servers).
tn13 11y ago
They are not trying to be nice by offering free plan. That is their growth strategy. By using Slack you are helping their marketing efforts. IF they even end the free plan there will be competitors and open source tools which will help you migrate seamlessly.
otterley 11y ago
You are a freeloader, but as long as they let you, you shouldn't feel bad about that. However, great products are worth paying for. If/when they start to charge or you exceed the free tiers' limits, you'll have to make difficult choices based on what they're worth to your business.
- jkyle 11y ago
  Ostensibly, the company is receiving some sort of value from the free plan users. Increase of adoption rates and "buzz" come to mind.

snug 11y ago

I don't see this happening. Free plans like this will typically help build better products to sell to the actual paying customers, or even help with bug fixes. I don't see them removing their free model.

Klathmon 11y ago

We found the current slack pricing to be way too expensive for us, but if/when they add video conferencing that equation changes drastically. Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...

AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
Slack has a pretty nice integration with appear.in. It's a free in-browser video conferencing service. We've used it with Slack very effectively in the past!
- Klathmon 11y ago
  That looks nice, but we need more than 8 participants. We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.
  - austinsharp 11y ago
    Entirely remote startup employee here: we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people and we use Sococo[1] for all our audio and video. The office layout is also really nice. Everything else we've tried for video hasn't cut it, in comparison. Note that Sococo will try to push you to their new browser based product. Last time we tried it, it was far worse than the 'classic' version we still use. But they don't really show 'classic' on their website anymore. [1] https://www.sococo.com/ https://www.sococo.com/
    - a_small_island 11y ago
      >we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people That sounds horrible.
      - Klathmon 11y ago
        (I'm not the guy you replied to but...) It's not bad when everyone knows what they are doing. You get the occasional feedback screech or something, but for the most part we aren't animals and we all know how to mute our mic's. And the added benefit of a face means you can get more body-language which helps prevent the "talking over" that happens on conference calls. Plus the way we have it setup now we can all "mute" one another, so if someone is causing an issue and doesn't know it (or stepped away for a second) we can instantly mute them and move on.
        a_small_island 11y ago
        So it's like a webinar scenario where only 1 or 2 principals or are all present supposed to participate?
        Klathmon 11y ago
        No we are all participating, but we only talk one at a time mostly. It works surprisingly similar to a real meeting. Someone runs it, and everyone else participates when they need to.
ihuman 11y ago
Discord, a Slack competitor, is planning on adding video calls https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends-list/ https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends...
- mbilker 11y ago
  Though Discord is targeted towards gaming. I use both and found there are differences that are important, especially in the realm of notifications, themeing, and integration with other services.
  - andkenneth 11y ago
    Yeah discord really isn't even suitable for gaming community staff, it's really best as a gathering place for your team/clan/community rather than a place to get real work done. We still use slack for admins/devs/other staff. One of my biggest complaints is the lack of easy to manage private channels. There's a super complex and powerful permissions system quite obviously based on mumble, but if I want to make a quick private channel to talk to two people, it's easier to make a whole new server than just another channel.
    - jhgg 11y ago
      Group chats are coming soon that will allow you to do this quickly & easily.
koolba 11y ago
> Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan... In comparison to a free plan sure but in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? That's less than an hour's minimum wage[1]. [1]: Technically it's quite a bit less as min wage in the U.S. is $7.25 and that doesn't include corporate payroll tax or medicare/social-security matching
- justJanne 11y ago
  > in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
  - koolba 11y ago
    > The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers? None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B). In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
    - justJanne 11y ago
      Yes, they aren't for-profit entities. But they still require history, easy to use chat systems, easy integration into Dev systems, etc. That's what was better about IRC: you can self-host and get all of slacks features for very cheap.
      - tempestn 11y ago
        And you still can, right? There are still plenty of alternatives for those who can't or don't want to pay for Slack.

kiloreux 11y ago

Have you ever considered switching to Hipchat ?

dntrkv 11y ago
In addition to the rest of the comments, HipChat doesn't handle file uploads nearly as well, the message formatting is a joke, message history randomly gets erased, simple things like posting a YouTube link in Slack will embed the actual video, you can edit message in Slack (HipChat has that silly "s/word/replace" feature). I use both on a daily basis and Slack is just better in every way.
thechut 11y ago
We are also switching to Slack from Hipchat due to bad downtime and messed up apps. Too bad, because it use to be decent...
- knodi123 11y ago
  Us too. Downtime and bugs. Recently hipchat released a major UI rewrite, and now there's no way to turn off autocorrect. It's almost useless for developers discussing code, if every technical term you type gets replaced with the first non-technical word that is "close enough."
  - marcins 11y ago
    I am assuming you're on OS X? You can right-click on the input field, and under "Spelling & Grammar" you can turn off auto-correct. This is an OS feature, not something HipChat specific.
    - knodi123 11y ago
      weird. wonder why this OS feature got turned on in the rewrite, but wasn't in the old version? Thanks for the tip!
mastacow 11y ago

marcog1 11y ago

I work at Asana. There's no way we'll drop our free plan. It's too fundamental to our sales model. We are, however, thinking a lot more actively about what features to make premium. Largely new features we haven't released yet.

dave2000 11y ago
We're definitely not getting rid of the free plan. Well, not until current management leaves, we do badly, get greedy, get bought out...
- tptacek 11y ago
  Yeah, jerk! Answer for your unknowable future! "No way", indeed... the temerity, to suggest their product will be free after the heat death of the universe.
  - JabavuAdams 11y ago
    Your response seems like an unnecessary escalation. I thought the post you're responding to was reasonable.
    - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's a joke.
      - striking 11y ago
        Jokes and other forms of amusement are banned on HN. It's been found that people here take things way too seriously, so the mods decided to ban jokes and humor outright. (Happy April 1st!)
        JabavuAdams 11y ago
        You know, I've had my share of rants, etc. on HN but revisiting Reddit has made me appreciate the HN policies more. I generally avoid Reddit these days, except occasionally dipping into the VR sub-reddits. The level of stupidity, entitlement, and general melodrama is ludicrous. It's like when you're subjected to the nonsense of a person who's become accustomed to being the smartest person in a dumb room. HN is just a smarter room. Like Reddit 10 years ago. We should defend that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jjawssd 11y ago

Dumped Slack for self-hosted Mattermost. Gets the job done.

meddlepal 11y ago
How is Mattermost to operate? Is it basically spin up and run or does it require some active maintenance?
- vvanders 11y ago
  Pretty hands-off. We've been running it a few weeks without much work(I had webhooks reset when instance rebooted but that was about it).
- educar 11y ago
  Well, almost every server requires maintenance. My previous companies had dedicated sysadmins even for jira. Those servers were not even internet facing. Have a look at cloudron.io (cloud servers) or protonet (on premise servers).

tn13 11y ago

They are not trying to be nice by offering free plan. That is their growth strategy. By using Slack you are helping their marketing efforts. IF they even end the free plan there will be competitors and open source tools which will help you migrate seamlessly.

otterley 11y ago

You are a freeloader, but as long as they let you, you shouldn't feel bad about that. However, great products are worth paying for. If/when they start to charge or you exceed the free tiers' limits, you'll have to make difficult choices based on what they're worth to your business.

jkyle 11y ago
Ostensibly, the company is receiving some sort of value from the free plan users. Increase of adoption rates and "buzz" come to mind.