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"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given tha
by fergie 7y ago
"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees.
Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), it could actually be a pretty sensible decision- especially when you take into account the tax and stock-price benefits of capital expenditure.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoZulip is already a thing. Not to mention other floss alternatives.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoUnless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.
- thecleaner 7y ago+1 for mattermost. Works out of box for most applications. But I think people will find it surprising how quickly one starts to run out of space. People can be very chatty.
- arbol 7y agoFunnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.
- aryamaan 7y ago> Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app. Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.
- manmal 7y agoThat's unfortunate - they could have made Mattermost on par with Slack instead.
- 2rsf 7y ago> mattermost seems to list Uber as their client Not directly related to mattermost and Uber, but companies tend to list clients even if the product is not widely used or was even dumped. You are a small team in a big company, you evaluate a product and find that it satisfies some of your basic needs but want to work with it for a while, so you purchase a couple of licenses for you team but stop using it after a year or two. voilà ! you are a client listed on their web site
- nikita2206 7y agoYou think a client of that size would’ve been billed using pricing designed for mere mortals?
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI take it you mean Uber? I find it hard to believe Slack has 27000 employees. Anyway, as another commenter pointed out, on an enterprise scale I'm sure you can get a good deal. I can also imagine however that at that scale you'll want multiple Slack servers / instances - which would add cost given how slack charges per person, per server. So there's a few alternatives then; self-hosted (some parties will offer enterprise customers the option to host an instance of their application on the customers' internal hardware), or rebuild it yourself. The latter one however takes a bit of math - how much is it going to cost to build, maintain and run it? It's easily underestimated. And yet, it's also easy for people working in an engineering culture with nearly limitless engineering capacity to just build it themselves - motivations being "how hard can it be", and "I need something more challenging than tweaking this button for my employer to earn 0.1% more money on this particular feature". I've seen it happen far too often.
- hef19898 7y agoThat's assuming that, with 27,000 employees (why does Uber have so many?), monthly licensing fees are not negotiable. Which I would doubt.
- hdpq 7y agothey're about to get a LOT more ...
- ac2u 7y agoAs other replies have said, with a high user count, they've likely negotiated that per head figure WAY down. But even if they didn't, it's not as simple either as "can those engineers clone this software for less than X", it's whether they can afford to take the opportunity cost of not having engineers work on something core to Uber's business.