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Comment by uiri | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that is kind of evil. I could understand if Slack kept, say, the last 20k or 50k and only showed the most recent 10k. For them to store all the messages indefinitely for all free servers means that they are incurring the same storage costs whether the server is free or paid. Are the bandwidth costs really that high to justify hiding all those messages (likely on the order of 100k or 1M for many servers) ?

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They might be shunted to a disk somewhere and removed from search indices while on the free plan, reducing their costs but allowing them to recover things after.

> Are the bandwidth costs really that high to justify hiding all those messages (likely on the order of 100k or 1M for many servers) ?

Given that the cost to you is 0, what cost to them is required for it to be justified to you?

It seems odd that providing a free but limited service is evil, based only on it being slightly more expensive to give you an even better service for free.

I doubt it's a bandwidth issue. It's probably that they have to keep more servers/servers with more ram up to index all the messages. Keeping something on a disk that never gets read is far less expensive than keeping it in RAM and indexed so that it can be quickly and easily searched.

"evil"

Ok, well the alternative is no free version. Yeesh, people are so entitled. They're trying to give you a mostly full featured version of their software in hopes that you'll pay them someday.

It's not evil nor is it about the bandwidth costs, it's just business. It's how they get you to spend money on a freemium product after you reach a certain cap. They've determined that you should pay if you're hitting the 10k messages limit.

No, they hold your data hostage because they can. Welcome to capitalism.

!? Except hostages don't know they're being kidnapped. Slack's pricing is no secret.

I assume you mean "hostages don't agree to be kidnapped"

yes, I suppose Slack not existing at all is a more preferable option /s

Third choice: Slack exists, but doesn't hold your data hostage until you pay. I mean, on my list of things I care about ideologically, this is lower than my concern for warm gin and my dislike of sweatpants. It's legal and totally within their right, but it's a crappy way to behave.

Actually yes

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