37signals Once Product Announcement

world.hey.com

3 points·rambambram··8 comments

The first product was 'leaked' during this week's interview. I'll try not to spill the beans

The interview is over an hour. On Twitter/X viewers say it'll be a Slack competitor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWsdUkQ_-0

A Slack clone sounds weird given that there are multiple open source versions already. Paying never is even better than paying once!

I guess how good the deal is depends on whether the "pay once" offering includes perpetual hosting.

Plenty of folks aren't willing to self-host services if they can help it, yet aren't satisfied with "Freemium" offerings (many of which tilt their funnel strongly toward the "-ium" end of the spectrum), nor are willing to pay "enterprise" per-seat rates in perpetuity.

Pay once, use forever (or at least as long as the company exists) with an open source escape hatch could be a successful (or at least sustainable) model.

They were pretty clear that you have to host it yourself. Lifetime SaaS plans tend to be quite expensive (WordPress is $38K IIRC).

Really? I submitted this and didn't search online for any clues. My first guess for their first ONCE product was an IDE. They happen to scratch their own itch, an IDE is something you install on your computer (usually) so it fits the 'pay once' model, and to me it seemed that DHH might have liked that. On the other hand, it might be the wrong target audience for their company.

Remember that one of their first apps was campfire, and that was a chat app

I remember, but I couldn't see them going back to that, so to speak.

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