Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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

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.

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

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