I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less of us: around 30.

I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous.

We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.