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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Slack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they'll all dump the free plans and we won't be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It's not like we can't pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I'd hope so.

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I work at Asana. There's no way we'll drop our free plan. It's too fundamental to our sales model. We are, however, thinking a lot more actively about what features to make premium. Largely new features we haven't released yet.

We're definitely not getting rid of the free plan. Well, not until current management leaves, we do badly, get greedy, get bought out...

Yeah, jerk! Answer for your unknowable future! "No way", indeed... the temerity, to suggest their product will be free after the heat death of the universe.

Your response seems like an unnecessary escalation. I thought the post you're responding to was reasonable.

I'm pretty sure it's a joke.

Jokes and other forms of amusement are banned on HN. It's been found that people here take things way too seriously, so the mods decided to ban jokes and humor outright.

(Happy April 1st!)

You know, I've had my share of rants, etc. on HN but revisiting Reddit has made me appreciate the HN policies more.

I generally avoid Reddit these days, except occasionally dipping into the VR sub-reddits. The level of stupidity, entitlement, and general melodrama is ludicrous.

It's like when you're subjected to the nonsense of a person who's become accustomed to being the smartest person in a dumb room.

HN is just a smarter room. Like Reddit 10 years ago. We should defend that.

Right. HN's lack of drama and brigading, and the fact that it's a small community, makes it a lot of fun.

(I just lament a slight lack of light-heartedness!)

> until current management leaves, we do badly, get greedy, get bought out

I think that's the point of the question?

Think he was making a joke (about how you never know what'll happen in future). Or at least I hope so.

I believe you're being honest, but what about in two years? Four years? Six years? Anything can change in that time span, including your sales model.

Not that this is a dig against you or Asana; it's just that this is how the world works.

More likely is that products come and go.

While that's true, the implication of the OPs statement is that the free plan does a great job converting users to the paid plan. While that's true, they'd be crazy to ditch it.

I'd pay for Asana if I ever needed to manage a small team on a personal project or if I start my own company. There's just too much intertia for me to change the project management software at the clients I work with now as a consultant.

We found the current slack pricing to be way too expensive for us, but if/when they add video conferencing that equation changes drastically.

Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...

Slack has a pretty nice integration with appear.in. It's a free in-browser video conferencing service. We've used it with Slack very effectively in the past!

That looks nice, but we need more than 8 participants.

We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.

Entirely remote startup employee here:

we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people and we use Sococo[1] for all our audio and video. The office layout is also really nice. Everything else we've tried for video hasn't cut it, in comparison.

Note that Sococo will try to push you to their new browser based product. Last time we tried it, it was far worse than the 'classic' version we still use. But they don't really show 'classic' on their website anymore.

[1] https://www.sococo.com/

>we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people

That sounds horrible.

(I'm not the guy you replied to but...) It's not bad when everyone knows what they are doing.

You get the occasional feedback screech or something, but for the most part we aren't animals and we all know how to mute our mic's. And the added benefit of a face means you can get more body-language which helps prevent the "talking over" that happens on conference calls.

Plus the way we have it setup now we can all "mute" one another, so if someone is causing an issue and doesn't know it (or stepped away for a second) we can instantly mute them and move on.

So it's like a webinar scenario where only 1 or 2 principals or are all present supposed to participate?

No we are all participating, but we only talk one at a time mostly. It works surprisingly similar to a real meeting. Someone runs it, and everyone else participates when they need to.

I'll need to check this out. We really don't like hangouts, and this could be our fix.

Discord, a Slack competitor, is planning on adding video calls

https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends...

Though Discord is targeted towards gaming. I use both and found there are differences that are important, especially in the realm of notifications, themeing, and integration with other services.

Yeah discord really isn't even suitable for gaming community staff, it's really best as a gathering place for your team/clan/community rather than a place to get real work done. We still use slack for admins/devs/other staff.

One of my biggest complaints is the lack of easy to manage private channels. There's a super complex and powerful permissions system quite obviously based on mumble, but if I want to make a quick private channel to talk to two people, it's easier to make a whole new server than just another channel.

Group chats are coming soon that will allow you to do this quickly & easily.

> Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...

In comparison to a free plan sure but in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? That's less than an hour's minimum wage[1].

[1]: Technically it's quite a bit less as min wage in the U.S. is $7.25 and that doesn't include corporate payroll tax or medicare/social-security matching

> in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything?

The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?

> The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?

None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).

In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.

Yes, they aren't for-profit entities.

But they still require history, easy to use chat systems, easy integration into Dev systems, etc.

That's what was better about IRC: you can self-host and get all of slacks features for very cheap.

And you still can, right? There are still plenty of alternatives for those who can't or don't want to pay for Slack.

It gets a lot harder when all the integrations only support webhooks or even only Slack.

Slack offers its standard plan for free if you are a non-profit org. But you need to be an org; you can’t just walk in and claim your free plan if all you have is a GitHub repo and a (even large) community.

That’s not really the case for most projects that would wish to use it, though.

Not everyone is KDE e.V.

They said business. Of course things are going to be different for organizations that either have no revenue, or depend on donations.

But when a lot of tools and integrations only work with Slack, then open source projects often don’t have the time to reimplement them just for their own projects.

The network effect leads to lots of open source projects having to choose slack – which, in turn, means they end up having to pay, without having revenue.

The problem is that Slack is not the only tool jockeying for a few dollars per employee per month. Hipchat, while not the cool thing anymore, is also much cheaper.

Agreed, we ended up on Flowdock ($3 a user per month) before Slack became so famous and it easily meets our needs.

Dumped Slack for self-hosted Mattermost. Gets the job done.

How is Mattermost to operate? Is it basically spin up and run or does it require some active maintenance?

Pretty hands-off. We've been running it a few weeks without much work(I had webhooks reset when instance rebooted but that was about it).

Well, almost every server requires maintenance. My previous companies had dedicated sysadmins even for jira. Those servers were not even internet facing. Have a look at cloudron.io (cloud servers) or protonet (on premise servers).

They are not trying to be nice by offering free plan. That is their growth strategy. By using Slack you are helping their marketing efforts. IF they even end the free plan there will be competitors and open source tools which will help you migrate seamlessly.

You are a freeloader, but as long as they let you, you shouldn't feel bad about that.

However, great products are worth paying for. If/when they start to charge or you exceed the free tiers' limits, you'll have to make difficult choices based on what they're worth to your business.

Ostensibly, the company is receiving some sort of value from the free plan users. Increase of adoption rates and "buzz" come to mind.

I don't see this happening. Free plans like this will typically help build better products to sell to the actual paying customers, or even help with bug fixes. I don't see them removing their free model.

Have you ever considered switching to Hipchat ?

Hipchat's downtime is atrocious.

exactly the reason we moved to Slack

It's iOS app is also trash.

android too

I never see the slack app in my top battery users; I saw the hipchat app in the top battery users all the time before I uninstalled the app. I don't leaving it running for work, but not at the expense of 10-15% of my battery.

People keep saying that, but I can't remember the last time Hipchat was down.

Its literally been down 3 times in the last week

https://status.hipchat.com/

Weird, maybe their infrastructure doesn't scale well and only goes down when the US is at work? Sadly there's no time stamps on their status page, so I can't tell.

It could be similar to people complaining that Reddit or Imgur is down or unstable, but that mostly happens to Americans. So Europeans get the benefit of an overbuilt infrastructure, because the companies try to scale to the load generated by Americans.

Unfortunately it's been down, or unusable, a TON in the last few weeks.

Hipchat is made by the aussie company (Atlassian) that made Jira. Nice flexibility but disastrous performance, and they haven't really managed to fix that in A DECADE.

Trying out their hosted Jira solution recently felt quite a bit like a throwback to the 90s.

I'm not going to trust them again, sorry.

(We ended up using Youtrack instead. A lot faster, a lot cheaper, but less flexible.)

HipChat was acquired by Atlassian, so they didn't make it. :)

I don't find our self-hosted Jira slow or a throwback to the 90s. It also cost $10. But these things are opinions. :)

If slack is working for them my advice is to avoid hipchat. It seemed to crash constantly where I work. We're very happy with (paid) slack.

The new interface is slow and all the downtime is frustrating. Wish we were using slack

In addition to the rest of the comments, HipChat doesn't handle file uploads nearly as well, the message formatting is a joke, message history randomly gets erased, simple things like posting a YouTube link in Slack will embed the actual video, you can edit message in Slack (HipChat has that silly "s/word/replace" feature). I use both on a daily basis and Slack is just better in every way.

We are also switching to Slack from Hipchat due to bad downtime and messed up apps. Too bad, because it use to be decent...

Us too. Downtime and bugs.

Recently hipchat released a major UI rewrite, and now there's no way to turn off autocorrect. It's almost useless for developers discussing code, if every technical term you type gets replaced with the first non-technical word that is "close enough."

I am assuming you're on OS X? You can right-click on the input field, and under "Spelling & Grammar" you can turn off auto-correct. This is an OS feature, not something HipChat specific.

weird. wonder why this OS feature got turned on in the rewrite, but wasn't in the old version? Thanks for the tip!

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