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Comment by whichfawkes | Hacker News Reader

I like Slack, because I can rely on non-technical people to use it, but if I'm working with people who actually know what they're doing, I don't see the advantage over IRC.

For free, it's a great service. For $5/mo it's a great service...but for $5/mo/user, it's pretty pricey!

If you don't pay, it doesn't make a good replacement for email, because you don't get infinite scrollback.

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Mm... If $5/month/user makes any difference to your bottom line in comparison to salaries and the benefits you are getting from the service, I suspect that you have a problem -- and one that has nothing to do with Slack. (As in, you've a serious sales or management problem in your organization, or you're not a qualified lead, e.g. you're a student or a non-profit.)

It’s this attitude that enables businesses to accumulate an unwieldy number of services!

My company subscribes to Google Apps, HipChat, Slack, Yammer, Zoom, … The costs accumulate.

Well, sure they accumulate. So do salaries. If it's not worth the money to your company, don't spend it. Same goes for salaries.

I don’t understand your analogy.

Imagine that an employee is costing you $X a year (that includes pay, but also things like health insurance, taxes, their computer/desk chair/etc etc etc).

If you use Slack, your employee now costs you $X + $60 a year. Usually in tech, X is a 6 digit number (or very high 5 digit number). If $60 makes such a difference in that balance, there are probably big things you should worry about.

Those numbers are not true for even half of the world. Also, I would want everybody in my org to be part of the same communication channel including every non tech folk.

You will definitely find folks for whom the $100/mo/user is not a big deal and Slack does have that plan with needed features. However if I am bootstrapping with a business with majority of non tech part time employees, its not a quick decision to commit to $8/mo/user.

For comparison, Google Apps provide their complete suite at $5/mo/user. Desk.com provides interfacing with customer starting at $3/mo/agent. With the value they provide I don't think twice before committing to it.

(btw, I could only see their cheapest plan at $8/mo/user paid monthly, where is $5/mo coming from?)

> (btw, I could only see their cheapest plan at $8/mo/user paid monthly, where is $5/mo coming from?)

I'm currently seeing $6.67/mo on an annualized basis, with no obvious means to get it monthly. Perhaps they just got caught red handed running an A/B test. ;-)

Whatever their price is, though, it matters little if an employee saves as little as an hour per month using the service.

And all of them save employee time which is your businesses biggest asset.

Unless everyone is using a separate application.

This is the ticket.

Slack is operating on three principles.

One, that their product actually has value commensurate with its price. That's a remarkable tenet for any product, and it keeps them honest.

Two, demanding a high value for a product influences customers' perception of that product. By not discounting or downplaying the value at all, Slack builds on the psychological worm that you're getting what you pay for. This has been proven in (consumer) studies to make people like purchases more compared to items of the same price or free.

Finally, they assert that the market exists and their customers have the ability and desire to pay for a better product (ddebernardy's point).

All correct.

You seem to be presuming an enterprise-class user (indicated by language like "in comparison to salaries and the benefits", "you're not a qualified lead", etc).

On the consumer side, I would say that the jump from $5/mo per customer to $5/mo per user per customer would be pretty significant. The number of users in the organization enters the calculus directly in the latter case, whereas it did not before.

But in another sense, yes, the person who posted the comment you are responding to is probably not a good "qualified lead" for you, whatever it is that you do.

I think your first paragraph is key though. I introduced Slack at a startup I'm working for, and I think the main reason we kept using it, and now use it for almost anything, was because the CEO and designer felt comfortable with it.

The same applies to Trello, in my experience. I've been able to convince all my clients, including the ones who will send me emails with attached .docx documents that contain low-res images for their gallery, and as a result I can basically live inside Trello.

Slack is getting close to playing a similar role, and the only reason it doesn't is that for the trickle of communication with many clients Trello is better.

Agreed. I think my perspective on cost may be a little skewed because I'm using it for a University CS Club with over 100 members and we can't pay $500/month for it.

I have less incentive to introduce it for the startup I work with because those people are all comfortable with email, and busy with enough other things that I'm not going to see 'instant message like' responses anyway.

You should contact them directly and work out a deal. I would imagine they would agree to favorable terms if it's academic-related.

Echoing malnourish, touch base with them and highlight to them that your context is that of a university. I'd gather they'll give the service away to you for free, if only for the sake of making sure you're team members are familiar with -- and addicted to -- using it by the time you're done studying.

The Lite option is free and has no limit on number of users. We use the paid option for a team made up of our staff, but we also just launched a new team with the Lite option as a way to talk to the sellers in our marketplace. I just invited 700 people of those people in to Slack and plan to invite several thousand more.

The limitation is that the archive is limited to 10k messages. But there are plenty of use cases where that doesn't matter.

We used IRC at my former company (Simple) and it worked well. This is notable because most of the company is non-technical customer support.

Oh, I'm sure if you can make IRC work, it might be enough. But aside from the fact that this can be a significant hurdle in many situations, Slack's integration with various tools is a significant advantage that IRC can't quite replace (easily).

For example, we've linked our various trello boards to their relevant channels, and as a result when I get into work (part-time) I can simply scroll through the 'front-end' channel and not only see the discussions between co-front-enders, but also see the updates on trello tickets in the same place, in the exact context of the conversations around it. That's become quite valuable to me.

It seems odd that Slack doesn't offer integration with FogBugz. Is FogBugz really that out of style now?

FogBugz always seems a bit... anachronistic and old-fashioned, but I don't know if that plays a role.

I agree with you, actually. I just thought it was still sufficiently popular to get support, especially alongside a lot of other integrated services that I've never even heard of.

I agree for external clients, they seem to be only targeting better communication within the company.

The advantage over IRC is centralised, searchable history, along with the fact that people don't need to be logged in all the time to be able to ping them. Sure, you could set up a bot with IRC, but then you have a separate interface for it and nobody uses it so all your discussions practically disappear forever, aside from their results in other systems.

EDIT: By the way - $5/mo/user is a tad less than what an on-site Exchange user costs, and is the same price as Office 365 Business Essentials (which basically gives you an email account and Lync). It's not overpriced, IMHO, given how useful it is.

It’s easy. Every user is a bouncer. They don’t need to configure anything. My former company did this and it worked well.

Does this bouncer have a log search interface, or does finding something that someone said a while ago amount to opening up a terminal and grepping, and hoping that nobody loses their logs? What happens when someone new joins the company and wants to see whether there's been any discussion on <whatever>?

It's not exactly a slick system, though it probably works so long as everybody in the company is a Linux software developer.

No. It doesn’t. Search was performed by a web app or a bot. It was slick.

My former employer was mostly customer support and everybody loved using IRC. Myself included.

Slack has an IRC gateway. [1] It works okay. My one gripe is that I can't figure out how to @mention my fellow Slack users via IRC, so I usually have the web interface open as well.

I hear you on the lack of infinite scrollback. They have to incentivize the upgrade somehow.

[1] https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...

It seems like Slack highlights any mention of your handle regardless of whether its prepended by an "@".

I have a small group of friends (just 6) that have been using IRC for years. We switched over to Slack purely because now I no longer have to manage/pay for a server.

Most of us use the IRC gateway and ignore the website, but we do use the Android app. Last I checked, IRC apps were pretty terrible.

Unless I'm missing some feature you're alluding to, Slack is a superset of IRC. It is objectively a mistake to use IRC instead of Slack (cost & "where is my data" aisde - only speaking of features)

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