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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees.

Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), it could actually be a pretty sensible decision- especially when you take into account the tax and stock-price benefits of capital expenditure.

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Unless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.

+1 for mattermost. Works out of box for most applications. But I think people will find it surprising how quickly one starts to run out of space. People can be very chatty.

Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com

Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

> Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.

That's unfortunate - they could have made Mattermost on par with Slack instead.

> mattermost seems to list Uber as their client

Not directly related to mattermost and Uber, but companies tend to list clients even if the product is not widely used or was even dumped.

You are a small team in a big company, you evaluate a product and find that it satisfies some of your basic needs but want to work with it for a while, so you purchase a couple of licenses for you team but stop using it after a year or two.

voilà ! you are a client listed on their web site

You think a client of that size would’ve been billed using pricing designed for mere mortals?

As other replies have said, with a high user count, they've likely negotiated that per head figure WAY down.

But even if they didn't, it's not as simple either as "can those engineers clone this software for less than X", it's whether they can afford to take the opportunity cost of not having engineers work on something core to Uber's business.

I take it you mean Uber? I find it hard to believe Slack has 27000 employees.

Anyway, as another commenter pointed out, on an enterprise scale I'm sure you can get a good deal. I can also imagine however that at that scale you'll want multiple Slack servers / instances - which would add cost given how slack charges per person, per server.

So there's a few alternatives then; self-hosted (some parties will offer enterprise customers the option to host an instance of their application on the customers' internal hardware), or rebuild it yourself. The latter one however takes a bit of math - how much is it going to cost to build, maintain and run it? It's easily underestimated.

And yet, it's also easy for people working in an engineering culture with nearly limitless engineering capacity to just build it themselves - motivations being "how hard can it be", and "I need something more challenging than tweaking this button for my employer to earn 0.1% more money on this particular feature". I've seen it happen far too often.

Zulip is already a thing. Not to mention other floss alternatives.

That's assuming that, with 27,000 employees (why does Uber have so many?), monthly licensing fees are not negotiable. Which I would doubt.

they're about to get a LOT more ...

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