Grove is here to stay
grove.io
grove.io
$10/month for 5 users on IRC?
This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service.
I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.
"Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails."
As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.
you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.
If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL.
Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous.
Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
It is very easy to get any of these running and if you read the docs (or the comments in the config files) there aren't many gotchas either. I wouldn't say they're zero maintenance, but they are fairly low - the majority of the maintenance you'd still have with a hosted server, as it's getting things working exactly how you like, and dealing with troublesome users!
One other point that springs to mind: if people want a free alternative to running their own server or using grove, there are lots of good IRC networks to choose from that will host your channel for free.
The first two words anyone is going to read on grove.io: "Hosted IRC".
Right about there, 80% of people are going to ask "What's IRC?". It's never explained.
"and so much more." Like what?
"plus additional features"... uh...?
"Why Grove is better". Better than what?
Oh look, a feature. Almost, if not completely on some screens, below the fold. "Archives and search"... of what?
Finally, "chat logs". Oh, it's something to do with chat. Well, I already have that!
If anyone even bothers to look at pricing, they're going to wonder why they want to pay somebody for all this.
Meanwhile, at least half the people who already know what IRC is are unimpressed. "IRC? Who uses that anymore? We have IM now. It's free. I even have logs.". Oops. Same problem.
Edit: Meanwhile, an experienced IRC user like me: I run irssi in screen on a reliable server. All my channels and private messages are logged, and I know how to use grep. What's grove for again?
Atlassian is a great example of an extreme version of this. The cost for me to have 10 users (on-premise, but hosted is similar) is $10 ($1 per user). The cost to have 11 is $800 ($75 per user).
It's a smart, if unintuitive pricing model - you can demonstrate the value of your product to cash-strapped startups that are going to be extremely cost-conscious, and start charging more on value once the company has started to see success.
That's where our nerdy brains go when confronted with pricing plans, but I'm not sure that the person actually buying this would see it the same way. Imagine that you're a business and you're paying for tools so your employees can actually get work done and make money. Do you really think that when you hire employee #6 (probably for an all-in cost of six figures), you're going to be scrutinizing the bump from $10 / month to $25 / month and trying to figure out what your per-employee cost is? Umm...no. You're going to hit upgrade and move onto something more productive. Or you're not going to be employing anyone for long.
I think they need to revamp their marketing speak and triple their pricing.
Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.
It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything.
Click, pay, and my world was rocked.
Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.
> curl -i https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Server: nginx/1.1.17 Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 193 Connection: close
<html> <head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center> </body> </html>
Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!
I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing.
[0] http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/
[1] https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it.
Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket.
On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.
5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user) 10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user) 20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user) 50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user)
I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.
They are just "outsourcing" the low-value stuff in favor of their core business.
That's just one example.
* Small companies.
* With some legal or contractual obligation preventing use of a public IRC server.
* But not preventing use of a third-party outside-the-firewall solution.
* And not having any criteria for the third-party, such as HIPAA compliance, warranties/guarantees, etc.
Seems a pretty small set...
Interestingly, grove doesn't seem to promise not to disclose the archives of your "private" server at all. Lots of ass-covering in their Terms of Service in favor of grove, and they have a privacy policy pertaining to their website, but nothing I could find about not telling the world whatever you happen to send their IRC servers.
The problem is, "hosted IRC" is a ridiculously bad marketing strategy. IMO, Grove should view IRC as a backend implementation detail, and not any part of their public offering. The only people who are going to care that Grove is backed by IRC are exactly the people for who hosting an IRC server isn't a big deal for.
For the record, I paid their top tier price (actually more than that - they created a custom plan just for us because we had over 50 users) happily for several months (and would have paid 2x more).
First, they have this nice web UI, which means hardcore geeks in the company could use their IRC clients while other people just using the channels ocasionally to get support (not all of them technical staff) can use the web version instead.
If that saved one hour of my infrastructure staff overall (and I am sure it saved quite a bit more than that) it was worth it - hiring first class infrastructure staff is very challenging, so their time is worth gold.
OTOH, sadly the service was unstable/crashed a lot and eventually we gave up and migrated to xmpp.
I actually wish they had charged more, because maybe with that they could have fixed those issues more quickly and I could have avoided another painful migration...
I know migrating (again!) is a pain, but if you ever want to give Grove another try, please get in touch (jacob at jacobian.org) and let me know what we'd need to do to get you back.
Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.
A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-acc...
Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?
Why does this exist?
nginx/1.1.17