Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

getdock.io

177 pointsyadavrh158 comments

Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare.

Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.

Open articleView on HN

I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.

In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.

I was about to ask the same thing. I saw mentioning of gdpr, feels like at least some europeans are involved.

However: I don’t want to have my data in the US for at least 3 years. For businesses outside the US: they simply cannot have their data in US anymore.

Build european/non-us would be a great argument to use this product.

@dang the founder/op’s responses seem to be getting flagged erroneously

From the comments it looks like people are flagging them as AI content.

FYI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503

I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.

My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.

What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.

Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.

I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.

We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.

We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?

I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.

I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.

Notifications need to be solid as well.

> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.

We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings.

Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck.

Give me Teams

Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where we can communicate with anyone

Downside is, its total lock-in to microsoft.

All the cross tenant inconsistency really needs to be ironed out, I'm not sure if it's just my org but half the features of calls are randomly disabled or enabled based on who originated it.

My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.

I feel the same way when I get an email with a Teams link, but I think we're all just going to have to live with the idea that everyone is on different platforms.

This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.

Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.

Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.

Zoom just works on the other hand.

If you had just downloaded Teams it would have worked fine.

It isn’t Microsoft’s fault that Safari is a shit browser and the macOS people who keep it as their default won’t switch to something better.

Can I download Teams without it also requiring Microsoft updaters and other stuff that insists on lurking in the background? Having a standalone MS app is fine, but I will never allow their updaters and background processes.

The Microsoft AutoUpdate tool is fully configurable so long as your organization doesn’t have any specific forced configurations.

You can uncheck automatically update and install.

You can decide whether or not to run the background service at all at the OS level.

This is a really strange hill to die on because your OS and other programs already have similar functionality, you are just saying no to Microsoft specifically. Chrome runs a background process to stay up to date, for example.

Yeah, so i'm not running Chrome either. I do not (from experience) trust Microsoft or Google to have software constantly running on my computer.

I realize that i can disable the service of course, but then i end up with outdated software.

You either update the software in the background, you update it manually, or you leave the software out of date.

Microsoft offers you all three options and you don’t like any of them.

I don’t quite understand what mystery fourth option you prefer Microsoft provides for you.

Going back to my original comment, you could have tried Teams in a real web browser before deciding it sucks. Safari is trash.

... and that's how browser monopolies are formed.

Your "something better" is certainly Chrome.

But that's irellevant because the likes of teams and google chat are made for management and at best sales, while slack is made for engineers.

Weird, there are an awful lot of engineers (last 3 SaaS companies I worked for) that are all Teams.

Do you think anyone asked them what they prefer? :)

I bet a lot of them don’t really care. At some point chat is chat.

I ran Teams calls in Firefox on Linux for years, it worked as well as Zoom, I'd say. Other integrations, like the online office files had some issues. Didn't do chats there, though, only the meetings.

All I know is the other two browser major engines work a lot better in practice than WebKit.

I don’t really know or care as an end user if WebKit represents browser choice. The fact is they Apple isn’t putting enough effort in to making their browser engine “just work” with popular websites.

If it was a requirement in iOS and a default in macOS nobody would choose it by choice. It would be dead as a doornail if it competed in a free market.

In my experience a comparatively broke Mozilla Foundation makes a better browser experience than the most profitable consumer electronics company in the world. Apple needs to do better.

Why is it on apple to make teams work for their web browser and not the other way around?

Because it’s not just Teams that’s broken, it’s a solid percentage of the websites I visit.

Apple can’t blame developers for their browser’s inconsistency.

Firefox has 1/10th of Apple’s market share and that browser is clearly more compatible with websites in my experience.

Whenever I have some kind of rendering issue or functionality glitch in Safari I switch to Firefox and it works fine.

Like, dear lord safari can’t even implement the back button normally. The behavior is terrible. It’s like you see a static screenshot of the precious page and everything is frozen for a second, and then if you’re lucky it unfreezes and at worst your scroll position gets messed up, or you’re unlucky and the entire page reloads.

Why can’t they make a working webapp for one of the largest browsers in the world? It isn’t like I tried to use Opera…

Because nobody can. Safari breaks on all kinds of popular websites while Firefox’s bucket of nickels development budget does a better job.

Apple can’t even make the back button behave smoothly.

Popular doesn’t mean good. Safari sucks.

From the perspective of someone who solely owns an iPhone they’d probably see a chromium monopoly as an upgrade.

> Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.

Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.

Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations.

We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.

But good luck!

replicating the api is a great idea!

I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.

Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just

A: making it better?

B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.

Really? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.

I agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.

I guess people love having a chat/videoconference tool available.

As for loving Teams ni particular compared to other solutions, I think it is far from the truth.

Perhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack"

Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.

Yes in some ways. Teams being bundled means that Slack and other messaging apps have to justify against a sunk-cost solution.

That makes teams very sticky.

I mostly meant sticky as in the most touched surface for day to day usage. Maybe sticky is not the right word.

And Google Chat does not have a native Desktop app. I guess they're the only chat app that don't.

Since when does an electron app count as native? You can install the webapp and that seems to feel basically equivalent.

History of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated.

They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.

And each iteration is basically worse.

XMPP should be able to be a Slack replacement.

Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile.

Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts.

Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet?

All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me.

1/10. Wouldn't recommend.

And don't forget Google Wave that did the whole "chat integrated with various multimedia elements" decade before the competition (and arguably, better, coz those could be interactive elements not previews of websites and embedded media)

I never actually used Wave. I didn't understand it, and by the time I was going to try it was shutdown.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Apparently it was generally available for 3 months. Probably why I missed it.

I didn't try Buzz either.

For me, Wave was the most exciting thing Google ever tried. The requirements exceeded most corporate hardware, but the whole "email as a wiki page" struck me as the future. Replay the messages in order to follow the responses.

(there was a lot of other stuff going on in there too)

I am not going to lie but I joined Zulip for some project and I really enjoyed it.

Stoat (formerly Revolt) is great for single server (ie. no federation between multiple servers) and matrix/xmpp are good if you want the latter (ie federation)

Good to see some more options though but all the services I shared are open source. Not sure if this is open source.

I don't like to use closed source services (usually) because then I am still trusting trust but I am gonna be honest that Closed source services make more money at times so there is a trade-off for some businesses.

I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat

I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack

The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale

How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?

How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?

How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?

What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?

Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?

I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does

Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000%

Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off

I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.

> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it

Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it

> or they increase their pricing by 1000%

1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely

---

> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.

But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor

> I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.

Until they get bought by Broadcom and deem you too small to waste time on.

Worse.. Slack is owned by Salesforce

$50k a year? Those are rookie numbers. You're actually fine, as a small fish going belly up isn't the end of the world. You can start a new business. For some big tech companies this is potentially near existential. I would know.

> I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.

They don't have to shut you off - but they've got every reason to raise the price.

If they can bully you onto a $15/user/month 'Business Plus' plan, your 1000 clients would cost you $180,000 a year.

Every third party you contract with can pull the rug from under you this way, even this new startup with its 'forever free tier'.

You plan for it as a potential risk just like anything else and, if the time comes, you can work on migrating out. Companies will off board third parties all the time if the financials don't add up.

> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

Would adopting the OP put you in a different position?

Ok, but what stops same from happening with any other solution? There are two things that would "fix" it:

* Fully open and interoperable protocol: We had it (XMPP), it was flawed, but at one beautiful moment in time it worked and using same protocol I could contact both google and facebook contacts. Then the companies decided "no, we would prefer to keep a walled gardens rather than make it easy to move to competition.

* Fully open source (no open core nonsense, latest Mattermost rugpull from OSS part users being one example why) chat platform with corporate backing and SaaS option - there is Matrix but afaik it is lacking feature-wise, tho I havent used it much. With plugin app store so it is possible to make and even sell integrations with other systems.

Second option seems more viable but it takes a lot of effort to make something as good as Slack or Discord

A lot of things people build with slack could be done with email but it is seen as old fashioned.

I didn’t read the full site but it seems they’re not really going for those users?

Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.

This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.

Honest feedback: seeing the promise of 'free, forever' as a selling point on some early-adopter SaaS actually puts me off. It's a promise that is always broken. I don't buy it.

I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous).

Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.

One of the ideas I have if I ever build a Saas or any tech related service is sustainability. I have written extensively about it but I am gonna be transparent about how much would be our costs, what tech stack we are using and literally everything and projections about it and how much we reasonably profit from our work on a project.

I don't want to screw over someone but I want my project to be sustainable and that too preferably without requiring VC funding ever.

Heck, I might even raise a kickstarter with all the info before I would require VC funding.

But also, I do feel like that there are services which can really reduce the cost of servers and I love cost optimizing servers (Read my other comment where I recommend some european services to them which might even be cheaper than their current stack but I do think that cf workers are very heavily subsidized by their CDN/security feature selling to entreprises where I have seen their contract sizes even go into 200_000$ or sorts)

> most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks

I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack.

The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.

I'd also love to see some Slack interoperability. We use and pay for Slack, only because our customers use Slack.

It is a competetive advantage to reach our customers via their chat platform. Slack being the walled garden that is, it's basically a Slack-tax we pay.

Yes, but they can also do the same with a group chat on WhatsApp, and email. And, XMPP was the protocol to do this before people found money in extinguishing it.

That's probably accurate in the US with the AI tech push to 996. You know, start at 9 on Monday and finish at 5 on Sunday.

> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history.

I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps.

Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions.

If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P

Most people say their number one complaint is limited history. But then you offer that, and they realize it was not such a big deal. Slack still wins on so many levels that I don't see anyone willing to move any time soon.

This caught my eye:

> $50 /month

> $300/year if paid annually

I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!

Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":

> Feature circus

> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?

This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.

People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.

I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing.

It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is.

If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.

Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.

>I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature.

Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't.

>If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.

Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue.

All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.

I believe they won't because that's what's in their marketing copy. Their selling point is a lack of those features.

Organization of volunteers, collectives of people, why aren't they using free stuff like Discord that is incredibly feature-rich in comparison? This is where I brought up the lack of features being a problem, because you could just use Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. By having so few features, it's competing with a whole lot of free stuff.

Regarding contractors, Slack handles external organizations in a pretty comprehensive way, very much unlike this product.

Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor.

I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams.

Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord.

Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing.

Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need.

The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).

I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.

The reasoning behind the product seems incredibly similar to Twist[0]. What would be the key differences besides “new is always better”?

[0]: https://twist.com

I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell.

Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.

why not mattermost which is open source you can selfhost and is really really good.

didn't mattermost recently make some changes to their license that put a bunch of features behind a paywall?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675

Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing).

I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.

I think Campfire used to have a one-time cost of $200 or something per domain, when did it switch to being free?

Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...

I actually just learned that from visiting now, haha. It's surprising.

I'd love a self hosted version of something that isn't IRC, allows easy sharing if media. Decoupling from US based companies seems to be prudent with the USA threatening war on the EU and any tools that can help us do that are welcome. I would not use this tool simply because it is not increasing self reliance, it just exchanges one US based company for several others.

Are you hosted on cloud platforms that are SOC2 compliant? Or have you achieved and been audited for SOC2 compliance yourself? I'm going to have to assume it's the former because if it was the latter you would directly say so. To me that type of sleight-of-hand inspires distrust, which is fatal to any prospect of me evaluating the product.

Beyond that, a key risk that has been brought into focus more and more lately is data portability and vendor lock-in. At this point I do not deploy a new vendor without documenting the exit strategy.

The best exit strategy you can offer is an open source, self-hostable version of the product with a simple migration plan. Some of the other existing competitors in the enterprise chat space already offer this. Even if no-one uses it, by offering it you keep your priorities aligned with your customers.

Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention becomes my documentation and I don't want that.

Use Slack? The pitch here is minus that retention limit.

Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…

Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.

As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?

From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap...

> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.

...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.

Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.

This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product).

Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.

Does this product fix coworkers who don't know how/when to thread, never-ending questions that are answered by documentation they could have read, and a complete refusal by people with authority to make decisions in a documented channel? Oh, turns out my gripes with slack are more about the people using it.

The value prop sounds solid, but on the homepage I really missed seeing the product. Screenshots or a short demo video showing how the UI looks and how the UX works would help a lot.

I felt like a baker was selling me "delicious pastries" but with the tray covered. I want to see what I am getting before signing up!

Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates

we use the "chat" instead of "channel" feature precisely because forced threading makes it useless, so instead of chat channels everyone is using multi user chats... what a fucking mess

Just wondering: Does anyone here use Discord as a Slack alternative? Meaning for Work™. Why and why not?

I've been using it for a small startup, not in a regulated space (not defense, fintech). So far no issue, but I keep thinking I'm missing something (maybe it's just "You use gamerz tool for work lol???")

Lack of control over moderation. If a person says something spicy and other person in company reports it, it goes to discord moderation and be banned for few days (or at worst case, forever). Also no way to use enterprise auth.

But other than that it's better chat platform than any other I used and it is very versatile when it comes to programming it, if you need it. Making flow like "you need to go thru the rules, then you get access to rest of the server" is possible, I even saw cool stuff like "click this reaction to get subscribed to that group of channels"

Surprised this wasn’t flagged off. This clearly isn’t a Show HN - it’s a waitlist signup. Please read the guidelines:

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

What would make me and my users move to an alternative comes down to the integrations and the seamless mobile transition.

The chat part, channels, tagging and upload of asset isn't enough, there are already alternatives to slack offering this that are open source.

I love what you're offering, I hope you get there.

I know it’s probably your MVP website and I may be in the minority here but..

I guess I have vibe generated website content fatigue.

The screenshots look nice and the colors are cool, but seeing the repeated phrases and words made me navigate back about 30% through.

It says no bloat, is that a nod to it being built with something other than Electron?

As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different.

If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).

Slack was originally more or less “better irc”. Can we not just make better irc?

What I really want is an auth system like Github. Let me create my user account and bring it with me to one or more organizations.

This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.

How is this better than Rocket Chat and what is the guarantee behind the free forever plan?

Slack used to have a generous free tier, until they stopped having it.

Why does every vibe coded site has a grid background? I know because my current 2 projects I inherited has the same background, all vibe coded.

Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system.

0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...

I'm gonna let you in on a secret... 99% of Mac users don't know what the Dock is called.

But Apple does.

Can it do something that Framasoft's Mostlymatter (or any other Mattermost fork) can't do?

How is it different from Zulip?

Pricing and conditions are always subject to change. That was the case with Slack too.

Yeah. We've seen many instances where "forever" isn't actually forever--even sometimes with paid lifetime licenses. I'd be much more excited by a self-hosted option.

This is just another step in a race to the bottom for prices. I don't hate it, but it's also nothing amazing. Flagging messages as decisions is cool (and something AI could do for us) but otherwise it's Just Another Slack competitor.

IMHO, instead of 90-day memory loss, use an LRU eviction strategy.

Is there any option to self-host in an air-gapped environment?

Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option?

I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.

This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto

Should be 2026, happy new year!

it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...

E2ee meaning what? Im assuming for compliance reasons any company needs to be able to access all of their internal chats?

Not the OP, but I’m assuming they meant end-to-end-encryption.

The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search.

I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.

e2ee makes it hard to do things like “search” which is important for working with teams. For personal messengers usually search is all on device w an encrypted index, once an org grows beyond 50 people that sort of thing breaks down.

kudos for posting a Show HN.

not doubting it's useful but it feels very vibecoded

> Async messages for deep work. Real-time chat when it matters. Work across timezones without the noise.

What does that even mean?

I encourage you to rewrite the copy and drop the emoji.

your CTA at the top is "join waitlist_" with that funky underscore cursor but there's a free version I can "get started free" now? doesn't add up

also I think the winner approach here open core like twenty.com. let people build on it, but charge for hosting it

just my $0.02. good luck!

Wow, they have a wait list. Are they also 50% off for a limited time?

Any more FOMO bits on their page?

can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations?

stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?

matrix, element.. too confusing

i use slack with one other person. we've been using it for 10 years. we pay every once in a while and download our archives. but i haven't found anything that's as useful, media-friendly, preview-friendly, and thread friendly as slack. we keep looking, but we always stay on slack.

I'm in a similar boat but with Telegram.

Honestly, if I had to start from scratch in my own company, I would pick zulip. That is thread friendly for real, for proper async communication. Slack threads were bolted on as a feature, and it shows. I know that in 2 this is not a problem, but the way that - for example - notifications work for threads when you have 10s (or 100s) of threads is a pain. Finding back threads you were involved with is a huge pain.

Unpopular opinion maybe, but 90 day memory loss is a feature, not a bug.

Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements.

(Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)

I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.

Sure, in some cases.

I have seen slacks for "former employees of $Company" where the house rules are that what is said should be taken as seriously and recorded as much as any remark said in a bar meetup. (i.e. not that seriously, not recorded). For these, not keeping old messages is a feature.

I try to treat slack/teams/irc like the office water cooler. Sure, we can discuss work, make decisions or come up with solutions to problems, but it has to be recorded elsewhere, in an email or internal documentation or whatever for it to matter and for it to be official.

Nothing sucks as much as trawling through old chats to find some decision that was made ages ago.

Yes, while a "work slack" or "company teams installation" is more formal than the ones that I mentioned above - it is for doing your job, while on the job - it's really not a good store for decisions and other facts.

To be clear, the slacks for "former employees of $Company" were not set up by the company, but by those people in order to keep in touch with each other. The chat had no official relationship to the company. This is why these slacks were regarded as the online equivalent of the pubmeet.

yawn, if i can't self host then you've already locked my data in.

hard passsssss

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