14 ms·

Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

177 points by yadavrh 9mo ago

Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare. Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.

deleted 9mo ago
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jms703 9mo ago
Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention becomes my documentation and I don't want that.
- OJFord 9mo ago
  Use Slack? The pitch here is minus that retention limit.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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pedalpete 9mo ago
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation. I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add. We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet. We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user? I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important. I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team. Notifications need to be solid as well.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - pedalpete 9mo ago
    I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
    - mathgeek 9mo ago
      Mobile notifications are a must have for any Slack replacement. Lots of teams have centralized their on call alerts to Slack.
      - olcarl75 9mo ago
        Don't this would be a problem. Mobile notifications are good with vapid/pwas nowadays
  - socalgal2 9mo ago
    I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs? Then your iteration stays ~ the same.
    - yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - troupo 9mo ago
    Please ask ChatGPT that you're clearly using to write these responses to reapond in proper human speech, and format for Hacker News.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Xorlev 9mo ago
> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps. Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions. If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - unsnap_biceps 9mo ago
    Your costs will change and shift over time. Personally, I don't trust anything that says "Free Forever" or "Unlimited". Give a real limit and figure out the transition. "Free now, and no plans to change, but if it does, we will give you one year to transition" is much more confidence building then "Free forever".
    - yadavrh 9mo ago
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      - Xorlev 9mo ago
        Google was already fairly profitable when Gmail was started, and did a considerable amount of capacity planning. It was also invite-only for a loooong time.
  - 9mo ago
koziserek 9mo ago
can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations? stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?
- browningstreet 9mo ago
  matrix, element.. too confusing i use slack with one other person. we've been using it for 10 years. we pay every once in a while and download our archives. but i haven't found anything that's as useful, media-friendly, preview-friendly, and thread friendly as slack. we keep looking, but we always stay on slack.
  - cdurth 9mo ago
    I'm in a similar boat but with Telegram.
  - Wilder7977 9mo ago
    Honestly, if I had to start from scratch in my own company, I would pick zulip. That is thread friendly for real, for proper async communication. Slack threads were bolted on as a feature, and it shows. I know that in 2 this is not a problem, but the way that - for example - notifications work for threads when you have 10s (or 100s) of threads is a pain. Finding back threads you were involved with is a huge pain.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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zeras 9mo ago
Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor. I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams. Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord. Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing. Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need. The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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a-dub 9mo ago
it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - a-dub 9mo ago
    it'll be exciting when someone finally demonstrates fully integrated, seamless and low-friction e2ee in a real-world application that is competitive in features and ease of use to traditional counterparts. i believe it would be challenging to get right, but is possible.
- ramraj07 9mo ago
  E2ee meaning what? Im assuming for compliance reasons any company needs to be able to access all of their internal chats?
  - mbreese 9mo ago
    Not the OP, but I’m assuming they meant end-to-end-encryption. The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search. I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.
- jitl 9mo ago
  e2ee makes it hard to do things like “search” which is important for working with teams. For personal messengers usually search is all on device w an encrypted index, once an org grows beyond 50 people that sort of thing breaks down.
beAbU 9mo ago
Unpopular opinion maybe, but 90 day memory loss is a feature, not a bug.
- dbcurtis 9mo ago
  Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements. (Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)
- dgunay 9mo ago
  I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
  Sure, in some cases. I have seen slacks for "former employees of $Company" where the house rules are that what is said should be taken as seriously and recorded as much as any remark said in a bar meetup. (i.e. not that seriously, not recorded). For these, not keeping old messages is a feature.
  - beAbU 9mo ago
    I try to treat slack/teams/irc like the office water cooler. Sure, we can discuss work, make decisions or come up with solutions to problems, but it has to be recorded elsewhere, in an email or internal documentation or whatever for it to matter and for it to be official. Nothing sucks as much as trawling through old chats to find some decision that was made ages ago.
    - 9mo ago
1123581321 9mo ago
I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - 1123581321 9mo ago
    I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere. If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.) Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain. That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request. You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord? IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land. It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere. I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile. People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff. People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison. People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.
kevin061 9mo ago
Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option? I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.
- verdverm 9mo ago
  This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto
deleted 9mo ago
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junglistguy 9mo ago
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danpalmer 9mo ago
From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you. ...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive. Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - nine_k 9mo ago
    This sounds reasonable (and the 30 microcents per request is pretty cool), but I wonder how do you handle storage and indexing. It still costs you, even when no one is typing.
  - danpalmer 9mo ago
    I still think you're looking at this from a very small perspective (and to be clear, to begin with that may be the right call, it'll just bite badly at some scale). It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second. Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure. It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers. Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it. I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
conception 9mo ago
Slack was originally more or less “better irc”. Can we not just make better irc?
ekianjo 9mo ago
Pricing and conditions are always subject to change. That was the case with Slack too.
- zdc1 9mo ago
  Yeah. We've seen many instances where "forever" isn't actually forever--even sometimes with paid lifetime licenses. I'd be much more excited by a self-hosted option. This is just another step in a race to the bottom for prices. I don't hate it, but it's also nothing amazing. Flagging messages as decisions is cool (and something AI could do for us) but otherwise it's Just Another Slack competitor.
ryanSrich 9mo ago
I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows? How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event? How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running? What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform? Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels? I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
- doesnt_know 9mo ago
  Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000% Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
  - ryanSrich 9mo ago
    > Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off. > or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it > or they increase their pricing by 1000% 1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely --- > Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over? Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah. But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
heliostatic 9mo ago
This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product). Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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with 9mo ago
Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing). I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.
- striking 9mo ago
  I think Campfire used to have a one-time cost of $200 or something per domain, when did it switch to being free? Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc19cd39cad9f560d61c0f27117365cf https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...
  - with 9mo ago
    I actually just learned that from visiting now, haha. It's surprising.
- deleted 9mo ago
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moomoo11 9mo ago
I know it’s probably your MVP website and I may be in the minority here but.. I guess I have vibe generated website content fatigue. The screenshots look nice and the colors are cool, but seeing the repeated phrases and words made me navigate back about 30% through.
TACIXAT 9mo ago
It says no bloat, is that a nod to it being built with something other than Electron?
- keyle 9mo ago
  As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different. If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).
keyle 9mo ago
What would make me and my users move to an alternative comes down to the integrations and the seamless mobile transition. The chat part, channels, tagging and upload of asset isn't enough, there are already alternatives to slack offering this that are open source. I love what you're offering, I hope you get there.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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  - sgarland 9mo ago
    I’d recommend making a Zapier integration. That alone unlocks a ton of additional automations.
frogperson 9mo ago
What I really want is an auth system like Github. Let me create my user account and bring it with me to one or more organizations. This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.
throwaway17_17 9mo ago
Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly… Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.
- sqircles 9mo ago
  As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?
- yadavrh 9mo ago
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lawgimenez 9mo ago
Why does every vibe coded site has a grid background? I know because my current 2 projects I inherited has the same background, all vibe coded.
armandososa 9mo ago
I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell. Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.
- luchsio 9mo ago
  why not mattermost which is open source you can selfhost and is really really good.
  - ghostpepper 9mo ago
    didn't mattermost recently make some changes to their license that put a bunch of features behind a paywall? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675
airstrike 9mo ago
kudos for posting a Show HN. not doubting it's useful but it feels very vibecoded > Async messages for deep work. Real-time chat when it matters. Work across timezones without the noise. What does that even mean? I encourage you to rewrite the copy and drop the emoji. your CTA at the top is "join waitlist_" with that funky underscore cursor but there's a free version I can "get started free" now? doesn't add up also I think the winner approach here open core like twenty.com. let people build on it, but charge for hosting it just my $0.02. good luck!
- nottorp 9mo ago
  Wow, they have a wait list. Are they also 50% off for a limited time? Any more FOMO bits on their page?
itake 9mo ago
IMHO, instead of 90-day memory loss, use an LRU eviction strategy.
jonhohle 9mo ago
Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system. 0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...
- mike_d 9mo ago
  I'm gonna let you in on a secret... 99% of Mac users don't know what the Dock is called.
  - jonhohle 9mo ago
    But Apple does.
bl4kers 9mo ago
Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  we use the "chat" instead of "channel" feature precisely because forced threading makes it useless, so instead of chat channels everyone is using multi user chats... what a fucking mess
stevage 9mo ago
This caught my eye: > $50 /month > $300/year if paid annually I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%! Whereas this, under the "what we don't do": > Feature circus > Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated? This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there. People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.
- dangus 9mo ago
  I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing. It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is. If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad. Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
  - stevage 9mo ago
    >I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't. >If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad. Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue. All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      I believe they won't because that's what's in their marketing copy. Their selling point is a lack of those features. Organization of volunteers, collectives of people, why aren't they using free stuff like Discord that is incredibly feature-rich in comparison? This is where I brought up the lack of features being a problem, because you could just use Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. By having so few features, it's competing with a whole lot of free stuff. Regarding contractors, Slack handles external organizations in a pretty comprehensive way, very much unlike this product.
TkTech 9mo ago
I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare. In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.
- yadavrh 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - sidsud 9mo ago
    please don't reply to HN comments with AI responses
  - nusl 9mo ago
    This is a copy-paste from some sort of LLM, which doesn't inspire any confidence. Pasted it twice too
  - janmalec 9mo ago
    This response sounds very much like LLM. "You've hit on a core part of our mission.". lol
    - OccamsMirror 9mo ago
      This rule of three structure too: "We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought."
  - usefulposter 9mo ago
    Please respect the HN community and kindly disclose when you are using an LLM to respond to user feedback.
NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
yawn, if i can't self host then you've already locked my data in. hard passsssss
ichik 9mo ago
The reasoning behind the product seems incredibly similar to Twist[0]. What would be the key differences besides “new is always better”? [0]: https://twist.com https://twist.com
benterix 9mo ago
How is it different from Zulip?
chaz6 9mo ago
Is there any option to self-host in an air-gapped environment?
logikblok 9mo ago
© 2025 dock. your team's home base. Should be 2026, happy new year!
wiradikusuma 9mo ago
Just wondering: Does anyone here use Discord as a Slack alternative? Meaning for Work™. Why and why not? I've been using it for a small startup, not in a regulated space (not defense, fintech). So far no issue, but I keep thinking I'm missing something (maybe it's just "You use gamerz tool for work lol???")
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  Lack of control over moderation. If a person says something spicy and other person in company reports it, it goes to discord moderation and be banned for few days (or at worst case, forever). Also no way to use enterprise auth. But other than that it's better chat platform than any other I used and it is very versatile when it comes to programming it, if you need it. Making flow like "you need to go thru the rules, then you get access to rest of the server" is possible, I even saw cool stuff like "click this reaction to get subscribed to that group of channels"
jacquesm 9mo ago
I'd love a self hosted version of something that isn't IRC, allows easy sharing if media. Decoupling from US based companies seems to be prudent with the USA threatening war on the EU and any tools that can help us do that are welcome. I would not use this tool simply because it is not increasing self reliance, it just exchanges one US based company for several others.
antifarben 9mo ago
Can it do something that Framasoft's Mostlymatter (or any other Mattermost fork) can't do?
ljm 9mo ago
Honest feedback: seeing the promise of 'free, forever' as a selling point on some early-adopter SaaS actually puts me off. It's a promise that is always broken. I don't buy it. I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous). Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  One of the ideas I have if I ever build a Saas or any tech related service is sustainability. I have written extensively about it but I am gonna be transparent about how much would be our costs, what tech stack we are using and literally everything and projections about it and how much we reasonably profit from our work on a project. I don't want to screw over someone but I want my project to be sustainable and that too preferably without requiring VC funding ever. Heck, I might even raise a kickstarter with all the info before I would require VC funding. But also, I do feel like that there are services which can really reduce the cost of servers and I love cost optimizing servers (Read my other comment where I recommend some european services to them which might even be cheaper than their current stack but I do think that cf workers are very heavily subsidized by their CDN/security feature selling to entreprises where I have seen their contract sizes even go into 200_000$ or sorts)
- 3rodents 9mo ago
  > most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack. The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.
xmodem 9mo ago
Are you hosted on cloud platforms that are SOC2 compliant? Or have you achieved and been audited for SOC2 compliance yourself? I'm going to have to assume it's the former because if it was the latter you would directly say so. To me that type of sleight-of-hand inspires distrust, which is fatal to any prospect of me evaluating the product. Beyond that, a key risk that has been brought into focus more and more lately is data portability and vendor lock-in. At this point I do not deploy a new vendor without documenting the exit strategy. The best exit strategy you can offer is an open source, self-hostable version of the product with a simple migration plan. Some of the other existing competitors in the enterprise chat space already offer this. Even if no-one uses it, by offering it you keep your priorities aligned with your customers.
herczegzsolt 9mo ago
How is this better than Rocket Chat and what is the guarantee behind the free forever plan? Slack used to have a generous free tier, until they stopped having it.
ericyd 9mo ago
Does this product fix coworkers who don't know how/when to thread, never-ending questions that are answered by documentation they could have read, and a complete refusal by people with authority to make decisions in a documented channel? Oh, turns out my gripes with slack are more about the people using it.
pentagrama 9mo ago
The value prop sounds solid, but on the homepage I really missed seeing the product. Screenshots or a short demo video showing how the UI looks and how the UX works would help a lot. I felt like a baker was selling me "delicious pastries" but with the tray covered. I want to see what I am getting before signing up!
captn3m0 9mo ago
Surprised this wasn’t flagged off. This clearly isn’t a Show HN - it’s a waitlist signup. Please read the guidelines: > If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

177 points by yadavrh 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jms703 9mo ago

Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention becomes my documentation and I don't want that.

OJFord 9mo ago
Use Slack? The pitch here is minus that retention limit.
yadavrh 9mo ago
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pedalpete 9mo ago

I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change. My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not. What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation. I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add. We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet. We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user? I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important. I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team. Notifications need to be solid as well.

yadavrh 9mo ago
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- pedalpete 9mo ago
  I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
  - mathgeek 9mo ago
    Mobile notifications are a must have for any Slack replacement. Lots of teams have centralized their on call alerts to Slack.
    - olcarl75 9mo ago
      Don't this would be a problem. Mobile notifications are good with vapid/pwas nowadays
- socalgal2 9mo ago
  I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs? Then your iteration stays ~ the same.
  - yadavrh 9mo ago
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- troupo 9mo ago
  Please ask ChatGPT that you're clearly using to write these responses to reapond in proper human speech, and format for Hacker News.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

Xorlev 9mo ago

> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps. Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions. If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P

yadavrh 9mo ago
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- unsnap_biceps 9mo ago
  Your costs will change and shift over time. Personally, I don't trust anything that says "Free Forever" or "Unlimited". Give a real limit and figure out the transition. "Free now, and no plans to change, but if it does, we will give you one year to transition" is much more confidence building then "Free forever".
  - yadavrh 9mo ago
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    - Xorlev 9mo ago
      Google was already fairly profitable when Gmail was started, and did a considerable amount of capacity planning. It was also invite-only for a loooong time.
- 9mo ago

koziserek 9mo ago

can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations? stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?

browningstreet 9mo ago
matrix, element.. too confusing i use slack with one other person. we've been using it for 10 years. we pay every once in a while and download our archives. but i haven't found anything that's as useful, media-friendly, preview-friendly, and thread friendly as slack. we keep looking, but we always stay on slack.
- cdurth 9mo ago
  I'm in a similar boat but with Telegram.
- Wilder7977 9mo ago
  Honestly, if I had to start from scratch in my own company, I would pick zulip. That is thread friendly for real, for proper async communication. Slack threads were bolted on as a feature, and it shows. I know that in 2 this is not a problem, but the way that - for example - notifications work for threads when you have 10s (or 100s) of threads is a pain. Finding back threads you were involved with is a huge pain.
yadavrh 9mo ago
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zeras 9mo ago

Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor. I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams. Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord. Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing. Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need. The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).

yadavrh 9mo ago
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a-dub 9mo ago

it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...

yadavrh 9mo ago
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- a-dub 9mo ago
  it'll be exciting when someone finally demonstrates fully integrated, seamless and low-friction e2ee in a real-world application that is competitive in features and ease of use to traditional counterparts. i believe it would be challenging to get right, but is possible.
ramraj07 9mo ago
E2ee meaning what? Im assuming for compliance reasons any company needs to be able to access all of their internal chats?
- mbreese 9mo ago
  Not the OP, but I’m assuming they meant end-to-end-encryption. The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search. I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.
jitl 9mo ago
e2ee makes it hard to do things like “search” which is important for working with teams. For personal messengers usually search is all on device w an encrypted index, once an org grows beyond 50 people that sort of thing breaks down.

beAbU 9mo ago

Unpopular opinion maybe, but 90 day memory loss is a feature, not a bug.

dbcurtis 9mo ago
Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements. (Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)
dgunay 9mo ago
I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.
SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
Sure, in some cases. I have seen slacks for "former employees of $Company" where the house rules are that what is said should be taken as seriously and recorded as much as any remark said in a bar meetup. (i.e. not that seriously, not recorded). For these, not keeping old messages is a feature.
- beAbU 9mo ago
  I try to treat slack/teams/irc like the office water cooler. Sure, we can discuss work, make decisions or come up with solutions to problems, but it has to be recorded elsewhere, in an email or internal documentation or whatever for it to matter and for it to be official. Nothing sucks as much as trawling through old chats to find some decision that was made ages ago.
  - 9mo ago

1123581321 9mo ago

I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.

yadavrh 9mo ago
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- 1123581321 9mo ago
  I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere. If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.) Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
- dangus 9mo ago
  The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain. That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request. You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord? IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land. It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere. I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile. People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff. People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison. People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.

kevin061 9mo ago

Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option? I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.

verdverm 9mo ago
This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto

deleted 9mo ago

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junglistguy 9mo ago

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danpalmer 9mo ago

From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap... > Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you. ...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive. Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.

yadavrh 9mo ago
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- nine_k 9mo ago
  This sounds reasonable (and the 30 microcents per request is pretty cool), but I wonder how do you handle storage and indexing. It still costs you, even when no one is typing.
- danpalmer 9mo ago
  I still think you're looking at this from a very small perspective (and to be clear, to begin with that may be the right call, it'll just bite badly at some scale). It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second. Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure. It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers. Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it. I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.

conception 9mo ago

Slack was originally more or less “better irc”. Can we not just make better irc?

ekianjo 9mo ago

Pricing and conditions are always subject to change. That was the case with Slack too.

zdc1 9mo ago
Yeah. We've seen many instances where "forever" isn't actually forever--even sometimes with paid lifetime licenses. I'd be much more excited by a self-hosted option. This is just another step in a race to the bottom for prices. I don't hate it, but it's also nothing amazing. Flagging messages as decisions is cool (and something AI could do for us) but otherwise it's Just Another Slack competitor.

ryanSrich 9mo ago

I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows? How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event? How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running? What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform? Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels? I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does

doesnt_know 9mo ago
Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000% Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
- ryanSrich 9mo ago
  > Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off. > or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it > or they increase their pricing by 1000% 1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely --- > Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over? Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah. But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor

heliostatic 9mo ago

This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product). Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.

yadavrh 9mo ago
[flagged]

with 9mo ago

Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing). I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.

striking 9mo ago
I think Campfire used to have a one-time cost of $200 or something per domain, when did it switch to being free? Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc19cd39cad9f560d61c0f27117365cf https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...
- with 9mo ago
  I actually just learned that from visiting now, haha. It's surprising.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

moomoo11 9mo ago

I know it’s probably your MVP website and I may be in the minority here but.. I guess I have vibe generated website content fatigue. The screenshots look nice and the colors are cool, but seeing the repeated phrases and words made me navigate back about 30% through.

TACIXAT 9mo ago

It says no bloat, is that a nod to it being built with something other than Electron?

keyle 9mo ago
As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different. If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).

keyle 9mo ago

What would make me and my users move to an alternative comes down to the integrations and the seamless mobile transition. The chat part, channels, tagging and upload of asset isn't enough, there are already alternatives to slack offering this that are open source. I love what you're offering, I hope you get there.

yadavrh 9mo ago
[flagged]
- sgarland 9mo ago
  I’d recommend making a Zapier integration. That alone unlocks a ton of additional automations.

frogperson 9mo ago

What I really want is an auth system like Github. Let me create my user account and bring it with me to one or more organizations. This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.

throwaway17_17 9mo ago

Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly… Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.

sqircles 9mo ago
As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?
yadavrh 9mo ago
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lawgimenez 9mo ago

Why does every vibe coded site has a grid background? I know because my current 2 projects I inherited has the same background, all vibe coded.

armandososa 9mo ago

I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell. Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.

luchsio 9mo ago
why not mattermost which is open source you can selfhost and is really really good.
- ghostpepper 9mo ago
  didn't mattermost recently make some changes to their license that put a bunch of features behind a paywall? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675

airstrike 9mo ago

kudos for posting a Show HN. not doubting it's useful but it feels very vibecoded > Async messages for deep work. Real-time chat when it matters. Work across timezones without the noise. What does that even mean? I encourage you to rewrite the copy and drop the emoji. your CTA at the top is "join waitlist_" with that funky underscore cursor but there's a free version I can "get started free" now? doesn't add up also I think the winner approach here open core like twenty.com. let people build on it, but charge for hosting it just my $0.02. good luck!

nottorp 9mo ago
Wow, they have a wait list. Are they also 50% off for a limited time? Any more FOMO bits on their page?

itake 9mo ago

IMHO, instead of 90-day memory loss, use an LRU eviction strategy.

jonhohle 9mo ago

Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system. 0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...

mike_d 9mo ago
I'm gonna let you in on a secret... 99% of Mac users don't know what the Dock is called.
- jonhohle 9mo ago
  But Apple does.

bl4kers 9mo ago

Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
we use the "chat" instead of "channel" feature precisely because forced threading makes it useless, so instead of chat channels everyone is using multi user chats... what a fucking mess

stevage 9mo ago

This caught my eye: > $50 /month > $300/year if paid annually I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%! Whereas this, under the "what we don't do": > Feature circus > Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated? This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there. People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.

dangus 9mo ago
I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing. It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is. If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad. Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
- stevage 9mo ago
  >I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't. >If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad. Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue. All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    I believe they won't because that's what's in their marketing copy. Their selling point is a lack of those features. Organization of volunteers, collectives of people, why aren't they using free stuff like Discord that is incredibly feature-rich in comparison? This is where I brought up the lack of features being a problem, because you could just use Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. By having so few features, it's competing with a whole lot of free stuff. Regarding contractors, Slack handles external organizations in a pretty comprehensive way, very much unlike this product.

TkTech 9mo ago

I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare. In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.

yadavrh 9mo ago
[flagged]
- sidsud 9mo ago
  please don't reply to HN comments with AI responses
- nusl 9mo ago
  This is a copy-paste from some sort of LLM, which doesn't inspire any confidence. Pasted it twice too
- janmalec 9mo ago
  This response sounds very much like LLM. "You've hit on a core part of our mission.". lol
  - OccamsMirror 9mo ago
    This rule of three structure too: "We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought."
- usefulposter 9mo ago
  Please respect the HN community and kindly disclose when you are using an LLM to respond to user feedback.

NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago

yawn, if i can't self host then you've already locked my data in. hard passsssss

ichik 9mo ago

The reasoning behind the product seems incredibly similar to Twist[0]. What would be the key differences besides “new is always better”? [0]: https://twist.com https://twist.com

benterix 9mo ago

How is it different from Zulip?

chaz6 9mo ago

Is there any option to self-host in an air-gapped environment?

logikblok 9mo ago

wiradikusuma 9mo ago

Just wondering: Does anyone here use Discord as a Slack alternative? Meaning for Work™. Why and why not? I've been using it for a small startup, not in a regulated space (not defense, fintech). So far no issue, but I keep thinking I'm missing something (maybe it's just "You use gamerz tool for work lol???")

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
Lack of control over moderation. If a person says something spicy and other person in company reports it, it goes to discord moderation and be banned for few days (or at worst case, forever). Also no way to use enterprise auth. But other than that it's better chat platform than any other I used and it is very versatile when it comes to programming it, if you need it. Making flow like "you need to go thru the rules, then you get access to rest of the server" is possible, I even saw cool stuff like "click this reaction to get subscribed to that group of channels"

jacquesm 9mo ago

I'd love a self hosted version of something that isn't IRC, allows easy sharing if media. Decoupling from US based companies seems to be prudent with the USA threatening war on the EU and any tools that can help us do that are welcome. I would not use this tool simply because it is not increasing self reliance, it just exchanges one US based company for several others.

antifarben 9mo ago

Can it do something that Framasoft's Mostlymatter (or any other Mattermost fork) can't do?

ljm 9mo ago

Honest feedback: seeing the promise of 'free, forever' as a selling point on some early-adopter SaaS actually puts me off. It's a promise that is always broken. I don't buy it. I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous). Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
One of the ideas I have if I ever build a Saas or any tech related service is sustainability. I have written extensively about it but I am gonna be transparent about how much would be our costs, what tech stack we are using and literally everything and projections about it and how much we reasonably profit from our work on a project. I don't want to screw over someone but I want my project to be sustainable and that too preferably without requiring VC funding ever. Heck, I might even raise a kickstarter with all the info before I would require VC funding. But also, I do feel like that there are services which can really reduce the cost of servers and I love cost optimizing servers (Read my other comment where I recommend some european services to them which might even be cheaper than their current stack but I do think that cf workers are very heavily subsidized by their CDN/security feature selling to entreprises where I have seen their contract sizes even go into 200_000$ or sorts)
3rodents 9mo ago
> most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack. The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.

xmodem 9mo ago

Are you hosted on cloud platforms that are SOC2 compliant? Or have you achieved and been audited for SOC2 compliance yourself? I'm going to have to assume it's the former because if it was the latter you would directly say so. To me that type of sleight-of-hand inspires distrust, which is fatal to any prospect of me evaluating the product. Beyond that, a key risk that has been brought into focus more and more lately is data portability and vendor lock-in. At this point I do not deploy a new vendor without documenting the exit strategy. The best exit strategy you can offer is an open source, self-hostable version of the product with a simple migration plan. Some of the other existing competitors in the enterprise chat space already offer this. Even if no-one uses it, by offering it you keep your priorities aligned with your customers.

herczegzsolt 9mo ago

How is this better than Rocket Chat and what is the guarantee behind the free forever plan? Slack used to have a generous free tier, until they stopped having it.

ericyd 9mo ago

Does this product fix coworkers who don't know how/when to thread, never-ending questions that are answered by documentation they could have read, and a complete refusal by people with authority to make decisions in a documented channel? Oh, turns out my gripes with slack are more about the people using it.

pentagrama 9mo ago

The value prop sounds solid, but on the homepage I really missed seeing the product. Screenshots or a short demo video showing how the UI looks and how the UX works would help a lot. I felt like a baker was selling me "delicious pastries" but with the tray covered. I want to see what I am getting before signing up!

captn3m0 9mo ago

Surprised this wasn’t flagged off. This clearly isn’t a Show HN - it’s a waitlist signup. Please read the guidelines: > If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.