4 ms·

And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?

dijit 4y ago
> $12 p/m Notably this is a 50% higher price than Disney+ Each subscription takes a toll. The price is set at $0, to make it more expensive is always going to be infinitely more expensive, but $12 is a lot for simple uses, and paying it in perpetuity is undesirable too. Whatsapp was $1/y when it monetised, and I believe they were profitable, for context.
morelisp 4y ago
Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    The question isn’t whether it’s worth that much to someone, it’s whether it’s worth that much to a couple using it to casually exchange messages (and/or what it costs Slack, which is definitely nowhere near that much). Feels like regressive AWS style pricing. The casual users are overpaying to provide the basis for advanced features only a fraction of users, who have sufficient resources to optimize their efficiency, need.
  - dijit 4y ago
    "serious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because it's a no-true scotsman: anyone not paying is not serious enough. "advanced features" is also vague enough to be true no matter what you mean. Practically speaking "magnetic notepad on a fridge accessible from anywhere" has been solved over and over and over again, and often in better ways. Slack is a shiny UX on a middling bit of software with a good marketing department.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Well by definition… how else would you differentiate between serious customers and tire kickers? It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features. And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.
      - dijit 4y ago
        Honestly this is just a really poor take. There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible. Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        You claim it's a 'poor take' but you only repeat what you said prior with more words instead of elaborating on how so. For example. 'Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era' How did BBS 'solve' this problem?
        dijit 4y ago
        BBS's, the pre-cursors to forums had real time notice boards and messaging systems. The only bad part of it was the fact that nobody had a BBS compatible device in their pocket, but the core functionality of a centralised message board accessible from anywhere in the planet in essentially real-time was definitely at hand. The major difference is that things these days are quite a bit more usable and we have little devices that are many hundreds of times more powerful than those BBS clients in our pockets. But there have been so many iterations on the same idea that it's absolutely FALLACIOUS to say that Slack has innovated in anything other than marketing, they are so far from the first and so far from the best that it's sickening that you would defend $12/mo PER USER for a family. yeah, they're not serious enough, but it's not costing Slack $48/mo to host 4 people, it probably costs $4 (very generously, taking all costs into consideration)
nottorp 4y ago
Yeah right, we know, it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. All those Starbucks coffees add up you know.
UweSchmidt 4y ago
The problem is that there are many useful tools and services that most of us are using for free: Text editors, browsers, email, forum software, all sorts of apps, cloud storage etc. It's not realistic to pay 5$ or 12$ a month for each. Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.

> $12 p/m Notably this is a 50% higher price than Disney+ Each subscription takes a toll. The price is set at $0, to make it more expensive is always going to be infinitely more expensive, but $12 is a lot for simple uses, and paying it in perpetuity is undesirable too. Whatsapp was $1/y when it monetised, and I believe they were profitable, for context.

morelisp 4y ago

Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.
- morelisp 4y ago
  The question isn’t whether it’s worth that much to someone, it’s whether it’s worth that much to a couple using it to casually exchange messages (and/or what it costs Slack, which is definitely nowhere near that much). Feels like regressive AWS style pricing. The casual users are overpaying to provide the basis for advanced features only a fraction of users, who have sufficient resources to optimize their efficiency, need.
- dijit 4y ago
  "serious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because it's a no-true scotsman: anyone not paying is not serious enough. "advanced features" is also vague enough to be true no matter what you mean. Practically speaking "magnetic notepad on a fridge accessible from anywhere" has been solved over and over and over again, and often in better ways. Slack is a shiny UX on a middling bit of software with a good marketing department.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Well by definition… how else would you differentiate between serious customers and tire kickers? It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features. And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.
    - dijit 4y ago
      Honestly this is just a really poor take. There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible. Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        You claim it's a 'poor take' but you only repeat what you said prior with more words instead of elaborating on how so. For example. 'Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era' How did BBS 'solve' this problem?
        dijit 4y ago
        BBS's, the pre-cursors to forums had real time notice boards and messaging systems. The only bad part of it was the fact that nobody had a BBS compatible device in their pocket, but the core functionality of a centralised message board accessible from anywhere in the planet in essentially real-time was definitely at hand. The major difference is that things these days are quite a bit more usable and we have little devices that are many hundreds of times more powerful than those BBS clients in our pockets. But there have been so many iterations on the same idea that it's absolutely FALLACIOUS to say that Slack has innovated in anything other than marketing, they are so far from the first and so far from the best that it's sickening that you would defend $12/mo PER USER for a family. yeah, they're not serious enough, but it's not costing Slack $48/mo to host 4 people, it probably costs $4 (very generously, taking all costs into consideration)

nottorp 4y ago

Yeah right, we know, it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. All those Starbucks coffees add up you know.

UweSchmidt 4y ago

The problem is that there are many useful tools and services that most of us are using for free: Text editors, browsers, email, forum software, all sorts of apps, cloud storage etc. It's not realistic to pay 5$ or 12$ a month for each. Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.