It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.
Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.
There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidating in a single client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.
None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.
I’d suggest the answer to that is probably no - an open source community is by its very nature going to want costs and overheads down, and all but the largest non profits and NGOs are going to try to get by by stitching together free tools and services. The one that is paying in your example is the one in Slack’s target who is going to be most likely to pay. Does Slack care about a few open source communities potentially churning? Probably not. Does it care about lowering average Time to Revenue? Absolutely.
Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone on free slack is on free slack because they aren't willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for their competitors.
2. Every private group chat might involve people who never used something like it before. For these people the software they use first is the baseline. And they are more likly to recommend the solution they already know to a organistation that is willing/able to pay for a higher tier.
They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is pretty badly handled.
People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to buy slack for work.
The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the employees requesting it.
Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack because of the employees.
But if the new employees will not even know slack exists… they will not be asking for it.
tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived as good tools for work;
and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to be good for use for personal reasons.
tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes, which it is
someone hav[ing] used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases
I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases
You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo
These tools built themselves on being free (as in beer) up to a certain extent, and now they're big enough, and trust their momentum, so they change their stance.
This will inevitably create some changes, both how they perceived and being developed, but we'll see...
However, web application development is much easier and scalable infrastructure is democratized now. Their moat may not be as robust as they imagine.
This will get interesting.
Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.
For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.