Ask HN: Is there a real reason to pay for things like Slack or Jira? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a real reason to pay for things like Slack or Jira?

1 pointjesuscript6 comments

I’ve been thinking about this and can’t really come up with a good enough reason for companies to pay for these products.

A lot of chat is already solved, you can easily host a number of open source chat servers internally.

A lot of projects are literally just that, a project, with tasks that you can assign to a person and mark it done/not done.

Even something like Dropbox, like, dump shit into a shared drive.

I don’t know, it just feels like the tech version of paying for bottled water.

Should they continue being billion dollar companies? YouTube is determined to keep showing me get-rich quick schemes like starting your own e-commerce store, day trading, etc and it just got me thinking that those schemes work on a lot of people. This dynamic must exist in tech also, and right away all I could think about was these weird things we pay for as devs.

Like, we’re really gonna pay for chat? We’ve lost our minds.

You don't pay for chat. You pay for don't having to worry about hosting a chat.

With your argumentation everyone could do everything themselves but that doesn't work because companies, startups even more so, need to focus on one thing they are good at.

Dropbox is so much easier than a shared drive, especially if you want to share files with external people every once in a while.

Also dropbox works with all OSes. Shared drives are usually a pain if you have a heterogeneous tech landscape in your company. This also includes phones, tablets, and so on.

What’s so hard about hosting a chat server though? I’m just curious, what is the nightmare story there?

I’ll grant you Dropbox.

I mean we all at some point look at our personal subscriptions and go why the fuck am I still paying for Netflix, I don’t even use it. But we never seem to consider that it takes less than hour to set up a simple chat server or install and open source PM solution.

It's not just installing a chat server though. It's setting up the server in general, securing the chat server, make the chat server work with your companies choice of auth, updating the chat server, updating the underlying server, .... How about file transfer in chat? Pictures? Gifs? ... That's what you gotta do with every solution you want so self-host. It takes time, costs money, and is likely still leading to a worse user experience.

Are there companies who self-host their chat and project management? Pretty sure there are. In the end, that's why slack is has a free option that works well for small teams that do not need to keep old messages.

I certainly don’t want to go back and forth, but I’m pretty sure xmpp and matrix support sso/files/images/emojis. Might take a day of setup, but one day of setup vs per year/per user subscription for something that’s been around (for free) for ages fails my this-is-bottled-water-we-are-paying for test.

It's not that the things you say can't be done. Of course they can.

But simply buying a product takes a lot of effort away. I've used XMPP messengers and it worked. But I'm a tech savy person. If you have colleagues who aren't then you need someone to support them in installing the client, setting up everything, etc.

With solutions like Slack there is a lot less friction. People know how to use it in a browser. People know how to install the client.

You pay for the convenience of the product, no necessarily for the features themselves.

none of what your suggesting is technically challenging to setup for a small org, scale it up to 10's of thousands for some companies, or more..

Plus its almost NEVER up to the tech people to deploy whatever they want, someone at the C level got a sales pitch for a given product, liked it (may have even gotten commission or a kickback) and told you to install, setup, support given product(s). or in my situation Infosec told the network guys to implement X and it breaks everything at the user level...

and your end users will hate you if you reinvent the wheel for every internal product/process... things like Jira put a ton of that kind of thing into one interface, under one user - preferably with single sign on.

your v1.0 of a given product will never be as easy to use, or well thought out as v10 of another vendor's product doing the same thing.

And those companies take care of regulations, scalability, and can even help with audit findings - not to mention gives you someone to blame when things hit the fan.

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