5 ms·

The due diligence in this case would have been researching the user limits which (as others have pointed out) were not published or advertised anywhere.

• dahart 10y ago
  There's a reason it's called "diligence", because it typically involves trying. Personally, I don't count reading a company's ad copy on their own web page as being even remotely diligent or doing much research. Normally 'due diligence' involves talking to the party you intend to engage with, as well as talking to others who have experience with that party. The author didn't mention any of that. Other users here also pointed out that there is a known specific API error message for the user limit. That kind of thing could be uncovered with a little diligence. Author could also have setup a fake team and tried to add many users before putting 8k real users on the team and just hoping. He did finally start talking directly to Slack only after he started having trouble, and they responded and disclosed the existence of a team size limit. This obviously could have happened before hitting the limit. The author expressed incredulity at what would be a $500k price tag, and yet completely fails to see why that is a massive glaring red flag. That alone should have been enough signal that his plan was skating on thin ice, but instead he drove right past all the warning signs and then blamed Slack for it.
  • Nomentatus 10y ago
    Trying a huge number of users? How without migrating? He could have asked innumerable questions all of which contradicted the description of what he was getting. He couldn't have known which was the right question. I very rarely query in person before a purchase; I did recently and was given a flatly wrong answer on one question, and then a very positive answer that wasn't logically coherent (strongly suggesting a no, in truth) on a second question. I'm buying anyway, but unless you can phone a corporate head, querying customer support for arcane technical information is rarely a great way to get the right answer, in my experience (sorry to say.) UNLESS you already have a proven fail, of course - which he did. If it were my program there'd be an error message in there no matter what the upper limit was; I assume others are as competent. I also don't follow your logic re the high price tag somehow logically entailing a secret limit on the free product - unless you're implying that it's a trap, a way of phishing for phools. (In my country, an illegal bait and switch, actually.) That's something that doesn't work too well when you're peddling to corporations, the pool is small and word gets around too fast.
    • dahart 10y ago
      > I very rarely query in person before a purchase Yeah me too, for things I buy for myself. But it's absolutely the norm for software purchases of $500k. That's what everyone does, it's extremely common practice for any org purchase of software for over 100 people. If the author were actually looking to spend $500k, he definitely would have called first and done a bunch of research. Nobody spends that much without talking to someone. The only reason he didn't have that dialogue is because he thought he'd get the whole thing -- apparently a $500k value -- for free. That's what I mean about the price tag being a signal. It should have signaled a phone call, at the very least.
• mcguire 10y ago
  "There's also no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." -- The Slack screenshot in the article.