they need to fix their feature set for pricing. For example, Google Apps Signon is pretty basic - but it is only available at the "Enterprise E20" level... where you have to actually call for pricing.
Mattermost team here. Thanks for your feedback,
While pricing is set that way for a purpose, we are always looking for ways to improve and we're keenly interested in what everyone has to say.
Our focus for Enterprise has been large organizations with sophisticated needs and it's important for us to have conversations and demonstrations with the people doing the evaluation so they fully understand what we're offering.
That said, there are people who use our free Team Edition or have read through our docs that just want a "buy" button for E20.
I'll bring this up and see what we can do.
PS: Regarding the word "fix", my personal view is that it's okay for a commercial product, because people are buying it as a customer. Enterprise Edition is a commercial product.
That said, many open source communities are adopting a principle of "kindness" and having feedback phrased positively where possible. People work hard to make open source software and give it away, and if conversations started on a positive note... well, why not?
So at no point am I implying that you should release it for free. But I do believe there are some features that should ideally be in the 20$ tier rather than the "call-us" tier.
Now this may completely be how your demographic falls, but generally speaking a small company buying 2-10 licenses would usually not have LDAP... but most likely will have Google Apps. And that's pretty much the gist of my comment.
I'm not very sure why people have caught on to the word "fix" - but IMHO i used it in the way that most people talk on these forums ("your website font needs to be fixed", "the copy needs to be fixed"). So I'm not sure if the word was offensive, but it was not intended to be.
Also wanted to mention that I was looking at your offering as a customer with a genuine interest to buy. We use Hipchat and their mobile app needs to be "fixed".. so I was in the market for alternatives.
P.S. also didnt realize you were YC. That usually doesnt happen.
Definitely hear your feedback on the custom tier, we'll try to figure something out this next week.
I'm all for criticism being constructive and polite, but in my experience fix is a neutral and common word in design and development discussions.
Open source + charging the enterprise a lot for customized solutions and/or paid support is a fantastic model and I wholeheartedly stand with your model.
(N.b., marketing strategy -- capitalize off the fact that everyone's data is being tapped now - e.g. Dianne Feinstein, in charge of the Senate Intelligence Committee's, had her staffers machines hacked - Apple is 100% hackable too (see: the San Bernadino FBI debacle) and offer secure comms at Blackberry Enterprise licensing pricing. I'd estimate > 95% of F500 is MS based/LDAP based on my experience. They're used to paying tons of money for Remote Desktop/AppX/Citrix/Exchange/whatever seats. You could easily get away with $60/user/seat + install fees + 50% for platinum support.)
Slack's free tier only allows you to keep a history of something like 500 messages, which makes sense because storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider.
This product let's you store all you want for free (seems like a bad idea to me), while things with essentially no cost per user once they have been developed (like google auth) are the things they make you pay for.
Details: Regarding "storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider," this is often not the case. Although at extreme scale (like any AWS product), it's absolutely true, for a typical Web app, the difference between, say, 5 and 50 MB of chat history is not what costs money. 2 things do:
1. Paying developers (that is, adding features). As you note, they have no cost per user, but they have a huge onetime upfront cost. Just because a feature doesn't have a variable cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't real and isn't distributed among n users[1]. Ideally, that cost should be covered by those receiving value from it.
2. Support and operations. Depending on scale, quality, and so forth, assume 10-30% of your payments go towards answering emails and keeping the service operating. Offering a feature like Google Auth does have a variable cost when, say, 30% of those who use it are going to ask a question, and answering that question well is going to cost $25 in time. Sure, a service could say "We don't offer support for free plans," but some services rightly don't want anyone to get stuck, even if they aren't paying. It's also harder to do thoughtfully than it might seem, since many customers who will eventually pay ask questions before they're receiving enough value to upgrade.
[1]: Again, a few services operate at such large volume that the implementation and support cost is a minuscule percentage of revenue. That's relatively few Internet services, though, mostly very high volume hosting. For other products, even all but the largest PaaS/IaaS offerings, the items above are substantial costs. Some services which would otherwise be lower-volume use this as a differentiator ("Everyone gets all features"), and that's great, but there's no reason to expect it universally.
S3 is a cent a gigabyte at scale, three cents when you're starting. sc1 drives on EBS are two and a half cents. Storage is a cheap, solved problem.
You make people pay for what's important to them.
I get Hipchat for free because I'm a bitbucket customer ($1per month) and I get Google Auth as built in. Most startups are using Google Apps.. But very few would use LDAP (which is indeed available in the 20$ tier)
So yes - I believe for the demographic I represent, their pricing needs to be fixed.
Look, I understand your desire to pay less for a service, but insisting that pricing needs to be fixed simply so that you pay less is still absurd.
You said "they need to fix their feature set for pricing."
Not "improve."
"Fix."
That's the word you used. And it directly implies that the subject it is referring to (the pricing) is broken.
I'm willing to pay their 20$ thing - but the features they include in that price is weird for the segment on HN. And for the features people like me would really pay for... there is no pricing (so I dont know whether its broken or not).
I dont want them to lower the pricing - I want them to rearrange it... or atleast talk about it. I dont know how much to pay to get the Google Apps feature.
The raison d'etre of pricing tiers is to charge a different price to different customers. Having to pay extra to get extra features is the point, not a bug that needs fixing.