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Comment by ddlutz | Hacker News Reader

So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at all.

My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.

It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.

I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.

We started using slack just for our dev/eng teams at work, and the interest grew to some of our customer side teams and non-technical teams, but management have been reluctant to expand Slacks licensing. Then we realized Teams is included with our MS licenses, so now we're giving the non-dev/eng side of the company that. It's only a matter of time before someone with a little sway asks "Why are we paying for this when we have Teams?" the murmurs have already begun, it just has to hit the right ears, so the days are numbered.

Both my current company and the one prior to that did the same switch.

We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.

Why/how is your org paying that much per user? I was under the impression that Slack topped out at well below that figure even for all the enterprise bells and whistles. I assume there are additional services/features that I’m not aware of? On-premise or dedicated hardware? Special data location requirements?

Slack is nowhere near 1000 a user.

Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is 180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA

Slack's paid plan is like $80/year/user. How on earth are you paying $2500?

When i moved companies, i went from Slack to Teams also. Dont notice the difference really. Our company did it because of the same reason they use outlook.

I do post a lot of gifs on slack.

We had /giphy banned b/c of inappropriate use.

It's not about current user, but potential user growth.

Assuming they grow their user base to be 100 times larger than the current 10 million, are they worth $16 per user?

Way more than that. They charge $7-12 per month.

And they lose money on that.

R&D expenses will presumably not grow at the same rate

1 billion users on slack? No way

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