5 ms·

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am. $10/month for 5 users on IRC? This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that

by aggronn 14y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am. $10/month for 5 users on IRC? This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service. I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.

mibbitier 14y ago
Imagine if they did it for email... "Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails." As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.
- asdf333 14y ago
  not everyone wants to worry about managing a vps. you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.
simonw 14y ago
"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo" If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL. Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
- problemdomain 14y ago
  It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month. I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous. Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
  - cmelbye 14y ago
    This. Most IRC servers (ircd-seven, InspIRCd, UnrealIRCd, etc.) are rock solid and require very little maintenance if you're not doing more advanced things like linking to other servers, linking to services (ChanServ, NickServ), etc.
    - ZoFreX 14y ago
      Throw ratbox and charybdis into the mix, too - very solid pieces of software! It is very easy to get any of these running and if you read the docs (or the comments in the config files) there aren't many gotchas either. I wouldn't say they're zero maintenance, but they are fairly low - the majority of the maintenance you'd still have with a hosted server, as it's getting things working exactly how you like, and dealing with troublesome users! One other point that springs to mind: if people want a free alternative to running their own server or using grove, there are lots of good IRC networks to choose from that will host your channel for free.
  - kingkilr 14y ago
    30-60 minutes of my time is worth something like a year of $10 a month charges. That's assuming no maintenance ever, good luck with that.
    - Avshalom 14y ago
      again, 10/month for 5 users.
  - Rayne 14y ago
    Is Inspircd significantly more difficult to set up initially? I recalling taking a day or two to figure out how to set it up and link to services.
    - problemdomain 14y ago
      I've never setup that particular ircd, but regardless of what ircd you use, once you add separate services to the mix, you're making life unnecessarily difficult. Separate services daemons are not needed for private IRC servers.
- jperras 14y ago
  We run an IRC server (all our employees are remote), and spent perhaps 1 hour setting it up on one of our internal ops boxes, and zero hours maintaining it since it's gone up. Uptime is currently in the months. Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.
mratzloff 14y ago
I really can't upvote this enough. They were selling the wrong thing.
martindale 14y ago
The main selling point of Grove over any other IRC provider is the beautiful UI that is easily understandable by non-technical users, and the easy linkability of historical content (for reference in emails, development tickets, etc).
andrewljohnson 14y ago
We pay 2/month/user for hipchat, and it's the best money spent each month, with the exception of maybe github. It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything. Click, pay, and my world was rocked. Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.
- Numberwang 14y ago
  Going to their pricing page and not getting the information, but instead having to sign up makes me not want to try it at all. Which is a shame, the demo looked good.

by aggronn 14y ago

mibbitier 14y ago

Imagine if they did it for email... "Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails." As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.

asdf333 14y ago
not everyone wants to worry about managing a vps. you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.

simonw 14y ago

"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo" If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL. Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.

problemdomain 14y ago
It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month. I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous. Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
- cmelbye 14y ago
  This. Most IRC servers (ircd-seven, InspIRCd, UnrealIRCd, etc.) are rock solid and require very little maintenance if you're not doing more advanced things like linking to other servers, linking to services (ChanServ, NickServ), etc.
  - ZoFreX 14y ago
    Throw ratbox and charybdis into the mix, too - very solid pieces of software! It is very easy to get any of these running and if you read the docs (or the comments in the config files) there aren't many gotchas either. I wouldn't say they're zero maintenance, but they are fairly low - the majority of the maintenance you'd still have with a hosted server, as it's getting things working exactly how you like, and dealing with troublesome users! One other point that springs to mind: if people want a free alternative to running their own server or using grove, there are lots of good IRC networks to choose from that will host your channel for free.
- kingkilr 14y ago
  30-60 minutes of my time is worth something like a year of $10 a month charges. That's assuming no maintenance ever, good luck with that.
  - Avshalom 14y ago
    again, 10/month for 5 users.
- Rayne 14y ago
  Is Inspircd significantly more difficult to set up initially? I recalling taking a day or two to figure out how to set it up and link to services.
  - problemdomain 14y ago
    I've never setup that particular ircd, but regardless of what ircd you use, once you add separate services to the mix, you're making life unnecessarily difficult. Separate services daemons are not needed for private IRC servers.
jperras 14y ago
We run an IRC server (all our employees are remote), and spent perhaps 1 hour setting it up on one of our internal ops boxes, and zero hours maintaining it since it's gone up. Uptime is currently in the months. Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.

mratzloff 14y ago

I really can't upvote this enough. They were selling the wrong thing.

martindale 14y ago

The main selling point of Grove over any other IRC provider is the beautiful UI that is easily understandable by non-technical users, and the easy linkability of historical content (for reference in emails, development tickets, etc).

andrewljohnson 14y ago

We pay 2/month/user for hipchat, and it's the best money spent each month, with the exception of maybe github. It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything. Click, pay, and my world was rocked. Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.

Numberwang 14y ago
Going to their pricing page and not getting the information, but instead having to sign up makes me not want to try it at all. Which is a shame, the demo looked good.