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Comment by klrr | Hacker News Reader

Why is it soo expensive? Otherwise relatively good idea.

I find it rather annoying that someone on HN will complain about the price of a service no matter how low it is. $20 per month is absolutely nothing. Most of the other team chat services cost more, and for good reason. Businesses are more than willing to pay a lot of money ($20 is not a lot) for software. Broke college students are not a good target demographic.

Before someone attempts to nitpick, 20 euros per month is nothing as well.

Because you get a full VPS, maintained by me.

At 10 people, it's already cheaper than other services, which usually charge a few bucks per user.

Your pricing is what failed it for me. I can get a 512MB VPS from DigitalOcean for $5/month.

I love this idea, though. I just feel that your approach of giving a full VPS is a bad idea. People who want a full VPS will buy a full VPS for much cheaper than the 20GBP you're offering it for.

What you need to do is multi-tenant your hosts, and isolate them from each other. Then you'll get costs savings that you can pass on to your customer; which will put you in line competitively with the likes of HipChat and Campfire.

Great idea, can't wait to see what comes of it!

The cheapest Campfire plan is $12 per month and the second cheapest is $24. HipChat is $2 per user per month. 20 euros per month with no user limit is entirely in line with this pricing.

> Because you get a full VPS, maintained by me.

This is bad. You're throwing resources away and increasing your management overhead. It would make more sense to have some sort of bouncer-type proxy to determine the source then route through to a dedicated ircd instance on a shared box (e.g. x ircd instances, one per customer).

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