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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

"The only way to make this go away is to pay slack's cheapest plan, which is $5 per user, per month. That's $5 x 12 months x 8,462 campers = $507,720 per year, just for our current campers. Until then, Slack aggressively archived messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent."

Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free? How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this? Usually, "freemium" services are offered so that users can try out the service without having to pay for it, but if you expect unlimited support for 8462 users, it makes sense to have to pay.

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Doesn't any IRC server ever do this? I mean 8500 users... isn't actually that much. Even if the free IRC servers don't support this amount of users, you could just set up a reasonably cheap server (for way less than half a million (!) a year) to do exactly the same thing.

And that's just the thing. Most people will see Slack as IRC chat, but a bit better. And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Doubly so if your chat channel is open for everyone and you don't know who your users are.

> And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month.

Considering they have tens of millions in ARR, the market has proven you wrong.

Slack is a lot better than IRC when used as intended.

Also, my favourite IRC client (IRCCloud) is, in fact, $5/user/month, and I know I'm not even close to their only paying customer.

I recognise you're engaging in hyperbole when you say "nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month", but when you're saying stuff which is so blatantly wrong (and trivially disproven), it undermines your entire argument.

$5/mo for an IRC client? That's just silly.

Geek cultured called -- they want their technology back. Apparently startup culture has corrupted our industry to a degree that people think $5/mo for a hosted IRC client is a fair exchange of value.

I pay shy of $5/mo for a VPS to run a BNC with my preferred config and serve a few files.

If someone prefers IRCCloud or Slack's features and support, it can absolutely be worth more than the sum of bandwidth, storage, and CPU.

The market determines prices based on what people are willing to pay. Apparently the companies who are paying Slack $5/month think it's a good value, since they've chosen Slack over all the alternatives. They may even buy it for purely intangible reasons, like their employees enjoy using it and thus communicate more effectively.

If you think you can offer the same services that Slack does for $1 a month, maybe you have an opportunity to start a business that successfully competes with them.

You talk about a "fair exchange of value". Is it fair for Apple to charge you a 50% markup on an iPhone? Is it fair for Starbucks to charge $4 for a latte? Do you know of any for-profit business that sets its prices based on an abstract notion of fairness rather than supply and demand? If your company was fortunate enough to make a 50% profit next year, would you offer to return some of it to your customers?

A single IRC server can trivially handle 8500 users in total, but most ircds would explode horribly on 8500 users in a single channel. There's probably at least one that can support it, but it's not really a use-case they're designed for.

What makes you believe that? 1,000+ user channels are common on Freenode.

Slack comes with more features than IRC though, but you raise a good point. Maybe this customer should use IRC.

> Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free?

There are several service I can think of that have a large user base and support for free (github comes to mind). However, I have to play devil's advocate and say that even some paid services have horrible (or non-existent) support and service.

> How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this?

Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes.

> Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes.

Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?

It's 100% clear what Slack is doing. From their homepage, they're building "a platform for team communication."

Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?

Startups are about focus. Chasing non-paying non-customers is not a part of that model.

Also, the difference with GitHub is pretty clear. GitHub is the tool for social coding. They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.

> Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?

Marketing? That's another stamp they can put on their list of users. Now look at what happened - instead of making slack look good now this blog post will show up showing how unprofessional they are.

> Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?

If they can't handle an arbitrary number of users - then they shouldn't be advertising it. They are the ones offering as a free service and advertising it as "unlimited".

Don't get me wrong - unlimited is a ridiculous claim (I would never ever claim any service I offer is (publicly anyways) unlimited - and if we had a marketing department that made that claim they would all be fired) but for the majority of their users they probably only account for less than 1% of usage. It's the same game with shared hosting - 1000s of people on the same server but 99.9% of people only use 1% of resources.

> They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.

Their marketing is contradicting - they say "small teams" then they say

"There's also no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack."

and

"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."

So...which is it? (rhetorical question because any sane person signing up would assume unlimited number of users as it says right there in one sentence with no exceptions or asterisks).

The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams". I interpret the more detailed description in that context: no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me: Slack is for teams, so they figured the number is well above any real-life use and probably applies to paid accounts as well.

> The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams".

Actually when you go to slack.com the first thing you see is:

"Slack is a platform for team communication:..."

and

"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."

With 2 textboxes for me to sign up for the service. Nothing to suggest that slack is for "small teams" only.

> The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me:

I don't think you'll get any argument from me - there are only a finite number of CPU cycles, RAM, bandwidth, and hard drive space. But - they should have designed to be a scalable service where all they have to do is spin up some VMs or dedicated systems to increase captivity. Yes - this costs money, but when you offer a free unlimited service - I feel like that's the cost of doing business.

> no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

They need to clearly define what small team means in their terms of service. The carriers were slapped for the "unlimited is not really unlimited"

This is what I found in their TOS:

"The total number of users is limited to the maximum number permitted for your account."

Which is what exactly? What is the limit for free vs paid?

Even if ads could cover the costs+, they might not want to have a lot of people to get the mindset of Slack==Ads. For many of those users, the ad-laden version of Slack might be their first impression of Slack.

you're almost certainly wrong about the advertising, viz stackoverflow's issues monetizing that way

forum/chat advertising is just not particularly valuable

Also, do people really expect to pay sticker price for 8k users? I mean, I have no idea what slack might have offered, but a quick email would have found out.

For instant messaging, possibly.

But there's a huge risk here for larger groups in that it goes from $0 to, in this case $500k/year with apparently nothing in between

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