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Comment by AdamSC1 | Hacker News Reader

Most companies tend to have more than one employee - especially when they decide to buy an employee chat software.

7 cents per employee per month isn't exactly a generous discount either. Even if your chat is down for half the work day (4 hours), you're looking at $3.55.

I mean, it's better than nothing, but let's not pretend it's compensation for lost productivity either.

My thoughts are this: even at 100x, the service credit is probably not that significant to the recipient. But the amount at 100x is significant to Slack. As the recipient, I don’t think too much about the money I receive back, but I know those credits in aggregate are quite painful to Slack (and a lot more painful than they could have otherwise justified) so I know they are taking the issue seriously and will work hard to prevent future outages, which is worth a lot more to me than the service credit.

As a matter of fact, the median company size in the United States is 1 - almost 80% of businesses have no employees at all!

But I agree that most of those 0- and 1-person businesses are probably not Slack customers ;)

I'm using unit cost here so it's easier to see how I personally feel about it. Just multiply the number by however many employees you want to imagine.

And if you have 100,000 employees on slack, that compensation will be $7,000. For a company of that size this is not really noticeable. Refunds don't really matter, I guess most clients would be happier if that money was invested in increasing future reliability.

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