Comment by nmcela | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmcela | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands.

We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.

So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.

You're not a customer, you don't pay for the product. If you want to be treated like a customer, then pay for the product. This entitlement mindset is extraordinary. Slack was literally paying for you to use their product. Regardless, it sounds like you're happy with your move.

Even if you pay for the product, using SaaS products VS hosting your own software, still puts you under someone else's control. The feature you really needed from them, might be decided that it should be removed, because only 1% of the total users actually used it, and you'll have no recourse.

This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where each user can run their own version.

I am their paying customer.

I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.

I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.

Does that mean you'll have no problem if Google deletes your email account, GitHub your repos and HN your posts (as well as put all threads behind a paywall)?

Honk honk.

The freemium model needs to die. Entitled “customers” that dont pay are pita and thanks to their mindset we end up with stuff like facebook and generally speaking an ad filled internet. Sorry for the tone but i’ve had it.

Thank you for sharing your experience, this is very useful!

> Along with these came many new business opportunities

Curious to hear more?

Also curious how long you've been running this stack and how large your organization is?

I’m not convinced running your own service is cheaper than paid solutions in general, if Slack can provide the same service for cheaper than it should be considered even if it’s no longer free.

I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).

However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.

Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.

Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd love to self-host in the mid-term.

Not yet, but that's on my todolist. I recommend this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.

After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.

Do you have integrated collab apps too ?

This should be the top comment.

While I agree with the sentiment that external dependencies are a risk, why should this be the top comment?

This person was having a service for free, having the possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an absurd mentality?

If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free!! Not even my taxes pay for it.

Why? Because it describes a technical solution to a problem, instead of complaining/rationalising.

I am/was their paying customer but I already explained that in the other comment.

My point was that I'm tired of not being able to trust any SaaS company long term. The service generally only gets worse over time, and then your data is at risk. So I decided I'm not gonna take any more chances with these and just try hosting everthing I need myself. So far so good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com