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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert?

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.

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> I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert? Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

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.

This. Companies should be charged, sure; but an upside of Slack is that I can use various tech community’s Slack, the union’s Slack, and the coworking’s Slack in the same app.

None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.

They can all better use Discord, whose model works on a per-user (not per-user-per-community) billing model. So less good at separating money from corporations but better aligned with non-commercial organisations as you don't need to pay $2k/month as none-profit just to keep chat history.

I guarantee you that the people making that call have thought about it and decided it's not worth it anyways.

> Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

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.

Not the OP but I think if free slack becomse unattractive enough people might start to look around. There are enough alternatives (self-hosted like Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or free tiers from other vendors e.g. Zulip, Discord). That presumably has two effects: 1. People are used to them and if the decision at the workplace comes up to choose a solution the other product is on the table. Or worse if Slack messes something up with the paid tier people might be more willing to switch to something else that they know already.

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.

We can't assume someone who won't pay for Slack won't pay for the thing they move to. How many people do you think pay for Discord's paid features that never would have paid for the forums Discord killed? The almost $15 billion dollar valuation suggest a lot.

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