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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> will piss people off

Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything.

It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.

Most paying customers are businesses. Those businesses are definitely not going to be pleased because they have people who personally depend on Slack's free plan. So, they've probably pissed off a significant number of paying customers.

Yeah, people tend to forget that companies are just groups of people working together.

But the company was built on that user growth. They were reporting the numbers to the investors and claiming "2.???; 3. Profit" all along. Especially now, with recession coming (interests rise => expectations of profitability increase), it's unfortunately suddenly important to show real profits.

> But the company was built on that user growth.

Yeah… and now they’re grown to a size where everyone knows the product and they don’t need to get people interested from scratch in the same way.

If subsiding free users isn't attracting more paying customers, then slashing free tiers is a no brainer though.

>It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.

Bullshit. It's unclear communication and indecisiveness that pisses people off. If you can't afford it, there is no reason for you to give something for free and then later take it away. People who are paying will feel that samething will happen to them in other ways. You want consistency.

You would prefer to never get a thing for free rather than have it at no cost for a brief period in time?

Having something for free but for a brief period of time is actually really inconvenient if you think about it. You are basically forced to move or find some alternative. You want consistency.

> Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything.

These users will either move to on-premise systems or pay to a competitor now.

If they’re willing to pay a competitor or self-host why wouldn’t they be willing to pay Slack?

Because self-hosting may be easier due to an in-house sysadmin who advocated this for a long time but turned down, or a competitor offer more value with a better price.

Not that the price will go down. Now they subsidize shareholders, which is quite worse in my book.

Same way my customers subsidize my dinner, I’m sure shareholders didn’t get in for free.

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