Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...
https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends...
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.
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
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.
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.
Not everyone is KDE e.V.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds horrible.
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.