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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

I'm staggered that there are 575 companies paying slack $100k / year.

I don't even have anything against slack but what is possibly worth $100k a year from a comms software?

Anything that saves a single engineer-year of effort, or less than half an engineer-year in a high COL area. Which for quite a lot of large companies, would cover their internal comms stack. It probably vanishes in comparison to, say, what they pay Cisco for their phones.

If you run a company with 1000 employees, that just $100 per seat, that's not that bad. Telephony is usually quite a lot more expensive than that.

And you can make phone calls in Slack. The call quality and experience is pretty solid too.

Better than Skype for Business in my experience. It can even do video calls and screen sharing with the pro version

You would be amazed at the types of software large companies pay for >$100k a year to solve narrow business problems.

Yep - and "how our engineers communicate" is far from a narrow business problem

Until recently I worked for a company with more than 100k employees, and Slack was much preferred over the previous Microsoft-supplied chat service. I have no insider knowledge at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if that company paid that much.

Big companies with thousands of employees license Slack with advanced features, mostly per user basis. So the payment is in direct proportion to number of people using it. $100k/year is nothing for any big organization.

To be clear the filing says >$100K, I'm sure some are spending way way more, it beats the cost of hiring an engineering team to do all this (build, improve, maintain etc...)

Slack's "plus" pricing is $15/user/month if billed monthly. That's $180/year per employee which is nothing compared to a salary.

My company pays quite a bit for slack and an alerts integration. My company spends ~$500k/day in client’s money and so real-time alerts in slack easily pay for themselves.

What do you use for alerts? We've been working on Slack as a destination for SeekWell (https://seekwell.io/).

Basically you can write SQL and if there are results, we'll send a message to Slack. Same works for Python, including plots / images.

All of our alerts I believe come directly the specific platforms or one-off integration companies (where we buy ads, so facebook/google ads/few others). SeekWell would work for us if we had a competent product team to build a data warehouse that actually worked. Some of ours operate like:

1. Supermetrics pulls data into a google sheet once an hour

2. Alert logic in the spreadsheet

3. Some slack integration (zapier maybe) sends slack alerts based on cell values

Currently looking at eletype to replace a lot of our custom stuff

https://www.eletype.com/install/

You can solve the problem of internal communication for your entire company at less than the cost of hiring a single engineer. I'm surprised there aren't more companies on this list.

Availability

Slack does a lot of things very well, but I've seen a surprising amount of downtime. YMMV of course.

It's been pretty reliable for me, particularly compared to the previous messaging service my company used (HipChat).

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