Do you have a source for that information? One of the roles of Slack[0] is named "Member" not "Coworker".
> the author should have uncovered this cap before moving his community.
He tried: Slack said there was no limit, yet there was. Even Slack themselves mention starting with a "pilot team"[1] to demo; which wouldn't have discovered the limit either. How would you discover it?
[0] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201314026-Roles-and... [1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/217626298-Tips-for-...
But your question presumes that the word "team" isn't enough, and that the implied team size that comes with a 10k message limit also isn't enough. Why?
The guy left a free trial for another free trial; if he's at fault we're all at fault every time we change our go-to software. The lesson might be that "there be dragons" - you should guess that any "better" program or SaaS out there is less that half of what it says once unknown limits have been discovered.
You should engage with the vendor. Perhaps there are intangible benefits to the vendor for you to use them even at no cost (PR, testing opportunity, etc)
Generally speaking, if you are dependent on a free service to do your business, you are fucked. A friend is a policy consultant who relied on Google Reader to be his knowledge repository. He bills the equivalent of $800/hr and was nearly paralyzed as it went away.
He didn't change his own personal go-to software, we're not talking about a trial of a video game here. He changed the software for thousands of his users. He put thousands of people on a free trial for something that was not obviously going to work.
You do have the option to investigate before you make that kind of move. If you choose not to exercise it, you don't have that much ground to stand on when things don't work out.
Other users here also pointed out that there is a known specific API error message for the user limit. That kind of thing could be uncovered with a little diligence. Author could also have setup a fake team and tried to add many users before putting 8k real users on the team and just hoping.
He did finally start talking directly to Slack only after he started having trouble, and they responded and disclosed the existence of a team size limit. This obviously could have happened before hitting the limit.
The author expressed incredulity at what would be a $500k price tag, and yet completely fails to see why that is a massive glaring red flag. That alone should have been enough signal that his plan was skating on thin ice, but instead he drove right past all the warning signs and then blamed Slack for it.
He could have asked innumerable questions all of which contradicted the description of what he was getting. He couldn't have known which was the right question. I very rarely query in person before a purchase; I did recently and was given a flatly wrong answer on one question, and then a very positive answer that wasn't logically coherent (strongly suggesting a no, in truth) on a second question. I'm buying anyway, but unless you can phone a corporate head, querying customer support for arcane technical information is rarely a great way to get the right answer, in my experience (sorry to say.) UNLESS you already have a proven fail, of course - which he did.
If it were my program there'd be an error message in there no matter what the upper limit was; I assume others are as competent.
I also don't follow your logic re the high price tag somehow logically entailing a secret limit on the free product - unless you're implying that it's a trap, a way of phishing for phools. (In my country, an illegal bait and switch, actually.) That's something that doesn't work too well when you're peddling to corporations, the pool is small and word gets around too fast.
Yeah me too, for things I buy for myself. But it's absolutely the norm for software purchases of $500k. That's what everyone does, it's extremely common practice for any org purchase of software for over 100 people.
If the author were actually looking to spend $500k, he definitely would have called first and done a bunch of research. Nobody spends that much without talking to someone. The only reason he didn't have that dialogue is because he thought he'd get the whole thing -- apparently a $500k value -- for free.
That's what I mean about the price tag being a signal. It should have signaled a phone call, at the very least.
-- The Slack screenshot in the article.