A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product.
If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms.
Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way, but that it will gone in the relatively short term. This is just reality.
Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.
You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start, that’s on you.
It doesn’t matter if the product is “worth it” because when you piss people off, they will gladly put in effort into migrating to another provider they can trust, because that’s what it’s all about: trust.
The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this, where Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive backlash.
It’s simply a consequence of just staring at the numbers, without properly understanding the psychological effect of taking something away from what is, despite the zero income but rather in a sense of trust, a customer. It’s just a customer you failed to get any revenue out of, and that’s your fault, not the customers.
Changing pricing pisses people off. Killing features pisses people off. Bad communication pisses people off. It’s really not that hard.
At the end of the day you’re making a deal with the devil with these overly optimistic loss-leaders, because you’re getting growth you never would have gotten otherwise. Failing to capitalize on that and then blaming the users while throwing features out the window is just not good business practice.
>Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.
I'd argue that most companies understand that perfectly well. They have a generous free tier to drive growth. Once that growth is attained and demand starts to level off, it's time to trim the resources devoted to free and force users (to greater or lesser degrees) to either start paying or go use someone else. There's great wailing and gnashing of teeth for some period of time on HN, Twitter, etc. but life moves on.
It's a pretty predictable playbook. See also Heroku of late. It should probably also come as no surprise we're seeing a number of examples of this going on at the moment.
Same with Evernote. Massive ‘growth’ on the free plan. No good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting features and locking people’s content in. There is no regular export to get everything out and you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app…
I think this should be outlawed. So many industries destroyed by cheap vc money, and then trying to raise prices once everyone else is gone. You can lose money doing research all you want, but the moment you start interacting with the market there should be a time limit until you can get your unit economics to work, or get out.
> Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.
This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people will be pissed off but your profit is from those who stay (because they invested too much to just migrate away).
> if you promote your product through a loss leader
To be fair, I don't think Slack ever actually did this. Slack has always been pretty terrible for semi-public communities, and I don't think they did anything to promote this. Free slack has always had pretty annoying retention and storage limits, and others like limits on how many integrations you can add.
I think Slack's problem has been that reasonably (at least in the beginning before Discord got popular and copied all of Slacks features), people liked Slack from their experience at using it for work. Indeed, Slack's advantage has/had been in appealing to the hundreds/thousands of employees making something they would want to use.
Very true. Reminds me of what Seth Godin wrote on how the internet has changed people's behaviour:
> Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. A hundred million people hear a pop song on the radio and less than 1 percent will buy a copy. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in their homes. (In the former case, the purchased music is better–quality and convenience–than the free version, in the latter, the print is merely more accessible, but the math is the same–lots of visits, not a lot of conversion).
> We don't hesitate to ask a consultant or doctor or writer for free advice, but often hesitate when it involves a payment. ("Oh, I'm not asking for consulting, I just wanted you to answer a question…") And yes, I'm told that some people cut their own hair instead of paying someone a few bucks to do it. The bet a creator makes, then, is that when she gives away something for free, it will be discovered, attract attention, spread and then, as we saw in radio in 1969, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it.
> As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish when they pay for something when the free substitute is easily available and perhaps more convenient. Think about that–buying things now makes some people feel foolish. Few felt foolish buying a Creedence album in the 1970s. They felt good about it, not stupid. This new default to free means that people with something to sell are going to have to push ever harder to invent things that can't possibly have a free substitute.
> Creators don't have to like it, but free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive. The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.
> You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective.
Consumer:
noun
1. a person who purchases goods and services for personal use.
It is sort of weird that people don't pay for a product, yet expect to be able to use it forever? It should be obvious that companies intend to convert "users" to "customers"?
You call them "consumers" but they are not given the have not paid for the services. Maybe "users" is more appropriate?
Do let us know what products you produce, and give away for free for years and dont want to monetize, it is just a charity thing for you even thought it costs you money to offer the service.
> If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start, that’s on you.
Yes, exactly. Companies can't tell consumers "it's free" and then be surprised people get upset when they change the terms. Do sufficiently sophisticated people know that free plans are always at risk? Yes. But clearly a pretty small percentage of people have fully internalized that, or there would be a lot fewer companies talking up their free plans in ways that suggest they're unlimited along important dimensions like time.
That makes sense. It was a race to the bottom. Now we're at the bottom.
It's like 2001 in a lot of ways. Spesh the terrible economics of websites, or apps, or call them almost whatever they want, platforms, anything.
Giveaways bring users. Free beer people show up.
Like there's no business here. No excludability. It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck of a cent for, and now they want to charge...well guess people will go to IRC directly. And maybe there'll be an FOSS prettification.
I think if you are on a free tier and your business depends on it, you should anticipate for changes in said free tier. If you want guarantees, you need to be a paying customer.
It's not trust they migrate for lmao, it's things that are "free". People are irrationally outraged when they have to pay for a product or service that was previously free.
Especially considering all of Google's products/services, people still cry about Youtube ads/having to get Youtube premium.
Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed?
My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay for services) start adopting a product.
It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last forever.
True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies):
Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.
And because there’s no way to know; the cost-cutters look at the numbers and say “cut the free plan enough to stop the hemorrhage”. Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts dropping and there’s no “clear reason why” and then it’s too late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust from scratch.
It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.
Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.
Slack's leadership likely think that Slack is already so ingrained in corporate settings that people will go for it by default, without word of mouth from people using a free plan. There is enough word of mouth from people who used it on a previous job. Sort of like Jira.
I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.
There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.
So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather those made by massive sales teams.
Not only that but there are decisionmakers in organizations that also use free tiers for stuff in their private lives. Piss one of them off enough and suddenly you can lose a big sale or existing customer.
So tinkering with free plans downwards can have unforeseen consequences.
And with the amount of data slack uses so low and costs of bandwidth and spinning rust approaching zero - the idea that free tier limitation are anything other than create a painpoint for people to upgrade is a joke.
I agree with the idea, at the same time I'm sure there's some income vs expense graph that shows expenses raising faster than income and at some point surpassing it.
I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer free hosting for open source projects, including github actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source" part is enough of a filter?
I think all of this is possible through sampling and customer interviews. Besides Slack has fairly high awareness. The marketing strategy changes as your product moves through the awareness curve.
After the Salesforce acquisition SF may believe they no longer need this funnel, since Slack now has access to all Salesforce customers and vice versa.
Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction!
Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card.
Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!).
Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg problem though.
This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people take are reversible.
Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back.
People love credit cards and similar products because there is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some kind.
If you start building a system that supports micro payments, the cost of running such a service scales with the number of payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people running a system need a way to make money. They can't just lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing with chargebacks and fraud.
Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.
Not necessarily. I offer a free tier because I want to, as a service to hobbyists and makers. It is not intended to be temporary. It's also not an upselling tool: features are distinctly different and there is no paid plan that would make sense for hobbyists.
Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat grinder.
But there is still a profit incentive. Users who have been running a hobby or community on your SaaS today might be creating a startup or advising a corporate tomorrow.
So while the community might never need your paid product, the very same users might create separate, paying accounts.
The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all if they knew that at some point they'd be forced to go from paying nothing at all to paying $87 a year per user?
I understand that to some companies their free or low-priced tiers end up being more of hassle than it's worth. But an $87 jump in order to access essential, previously available features seems like a good way to chop off your long tail of low volume users. Such a change could be deadly to a service's popularity and long-term prospects. Or maybe not.
The pricing step is crazy. There's no way it matches the expense from Slacks side, but I guess they're just saying "you're not our target market" by charging that much per user.
The weird thing is that if that's the case, their target market doesn't really need a free tier at all - maybe a time limited demo. So I expect more restrictions in the future.
Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and companies have been shoving them in our faces for decades.
- "Free gigabytes of mail storage!"
- "Free communication with your teams"
- "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!"
The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate them. Once the competition is gone or investors demand more money destroy the tier/raise prices.
FB is trying to do that to Craigslist with marketplaces, Uber and Lyft and doing that with Taxis, AirBnb with... etc etc etc
- infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially;
- user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially;
- OpEx may increase, linearly;
- therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with astronomical wealth.
- and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual costs is pointless. Harmful even! We’re offering values, not collecting fees. We’re going for the moon! Forget about gases for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That’s irrelevant.
This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight. And now Houston is working on a solution.
The free tier usecases don't themselves need to convert for this to work out long term. They do need to convert the same customers for other usecases though - usually work.
Keeping the free tier indefinite (in time, if not in storage) helps to keep the product used, therefore top of mind, therefore the default choice for the latter when those decisions come around. Or, even where the user is not the decision maker, they will likely still be an advocate / non-complaining user at the least.
Just directly trying to convert the free usecases by time-limiting them so as to make many of them unusable feels like more of a short term 'upcoming quarters' geared strategy. For sure they will convert some 'real work' usecases here who are able to function in the current space-limited free tier, as well as saving some costs on compute and storage, and it may boost numbers in the short term.
But long term, is it the best strategy? If all those free users now switch to, say, discord, guess which tool gets picked more for the 'real work' usecases by those same people in 5 years. Over that timeframe, will the savings in resources have been worth it? I guess this analysis must have been done, but it feels very possible the answer will turn out to be no.
Long term, users learn not to trust cloud services that are based on taking the customer's data hostage: not only the loss leader free tiers that are too good to be true, but anything.
If Google had bought Slack, the free tier would almost certainly have stayed. Of course the compromise would be that you would be served ads and you would have to agree your Slack messages would be used to target those ads to your specific interests.
Salesforce is where products go to die. Slack will eventually get integrated in their Frankenstack and lose functionality. Salesforce can afford this strategy as long as they can keep charging $$$ for their CRM software that genuinely deserves its own circle in hell.
My family has been using Slack for several years to share/store odds and ends like recipes and bookmarks. When I heard about this change, I did a full data export. After 5+ years of not-infrequent use, the data blob was all of 1.5 MB. Virtually nothing.
There is an argument to be made that while it looks like a loss in a limited time frame, having all those new developers become advocates later on will pay itself back
---
edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar argument might be made still
I have several free Slack groups that I've used for years. I haven't paid a cent. But it means I've also have Slack installed by default. At every company I've worked, I've supported using Slack because I'm a happy user and these companies have shelled out for paid plans.
It feels similar to how MS Office is given out for free to students and sold to companies.
The issue is that people are usually members of multiple organizations on Slack, most of them free but some paid. A change like this that retroactively impacts non-grandfathered chats (especially chats which are low usage and likely low infra cost) is going to alienate people who may at some point have decision-making power over an organization’s choice of paid chat service.
I agree with your comment, but most importantly, I hope (tho I know it won't happen) this helps people to open their eyes and realize the importance of self hosting their own stuff, I could understand that maybe 10 years ago it wasn't just as easy but now days if you are trully a small team or one with very low transit you can host your stuff even on a Raspberry PI and it would not be more expensive than permanently keeping a light bulb on besides granting you tons of flexibility. I mean, if you are less than 10 people you can even use that same hardware to keep a IM server and possibly a simple web page or some other application of interest, honestly that's what you get for being too cheap
Doesn’t have to be reality. Even when a firm is profitable and has scale it can still act as a funnel for new business.
It also helps to keep some competitors out. One less toehold for newcomers to get traction in a market. Just look at the comments on the recent Heroku announcement - how many will now consider an alternative option.
More likely management have lost interest in growth and are looking to squeeze as much out of the existing customer base as possible. Not usually a good sign for investors or users.
Yeah, but this is the equivalent of Costco raising food court prices to match real production costs. Costco would never do that, of course, because they understand how a loss leader works. The real solution is to reduce costs using vertical integration, so if AWS storage is your main cost driver then start building your own data centers. Instead, this move will harm their best customer acquisition channel, negatively affecting long-term growth.
Well, what you said applies even if you are paying for something, if the price is unsustainable for the service provider at scale.
The real question you have to ask is, "is my use of this service providing a sustainable benefit for the owner". If not, you can guarantee it will go away or change eventually. If it is, it's probably OK even if its free. For example, I don't expect Google search to go away, even though it's free.
They should make an exception for low volume/infrequent users. Yes free-tier power users should get incentive to level up. But if you have a slack with your spouse for house ideas where you post a few times a year, I think this is the type of user that gets the most pissed off by limits, because leveling up to the paid tier for a few messages a year seems like a ripoff/moneygrab.
On one hand that's true, on the other hand search is mostly about text data which has negligable storage size requirements (they could just say: we'll keep the search history for ever, but drop large binary blobs like images and videos after 90 days).
Well there was this episode of I think a16z, where initially they used the free accounts in their numbers (around, churn, etc). But later around those to marketing and cac instead.
All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed
I think they made a mistake disallowing single user upgrading to paid plan.
Non-corporate users will migrate to Discord, Slack will cut resources costs = more money without new users. Everyone happy, just allow us to export data ;)
It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community.
I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.
Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.
Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world.
I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation.
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information.
Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.
Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.
Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.
Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful
In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
> I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident
I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums.
Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.
(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today.
However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
> The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
> In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know how to design anything. The people who do know how to design websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the interest of some alien species from another dimension- see how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density. Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.
Last activity and a (small) icon are valuable information. The icons visually distinguish users and "last seen" lets you know whether you are replying to a person or primarily replying for the benefit of the community. Also, distinct pagination means you have a stable location for each post instead of "scroll around until you see it".
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread.
i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages.
The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
I think https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.
> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident)
You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there.
Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands.
We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.
So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.
You're not a customer, you don't pay for the product. If you want to be treated like a customer, then pay for the product. This entitlement mindset is extraordinary. Slack was literally paying for you to use their product. Regardless, it sounds like you're happy with your move.
Even if you pay for the product, using SaaS products VS hosting your own software, still puts you under someone else's control. The feature you really needed from them, might be decided that it should be removed, because only 1% of the total users actually used it, and you'll have no recourse.
This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where each user can run their own version.
I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.
I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.
Does that mean you'll have no problem if Google deletes your email account, GitHub your repos and HN your posts (as well as put all threads behind a paywall)?
The freemium model needs to die. Entitled “customers” that dont pay are pita and thanks to their mindset we end up with stuff like facebook and generally speaking an ad filled internet. Sorry for the tone but i’ve had it.
I’m not convinced running your own service is cheaper than paid solutions in general, if Slack can provide the same service for cheaper than it should be considered even if it’s no longer free.
I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).
However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.
Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.
In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.
After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.
While I agree with the sentiment that external dependencies are a risk, why should this be the top comment?
This person was having a service for free, having the possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an absurd mentality?
If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free!! Not even my taxes pay for it.
I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If not, then you have your own freeloader problem you have to address.
This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less than a cup of coffee) to support the host.
It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to twist the screws a little.
My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan things, talk etc etc.
It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old.
I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a member of 3 paid slack myself.
Now we need to install a second app for this sort of stuff. As more people do that, it's going to mean more people are exposed to Slack alternatives and might move to them fully.
Making things free also makes them sticky for people using them in more than one way. They've now broken that.
Its been great for you to use Slack and to be able to go back and view conversations from years ago. It’s so useful to you that you’ve used it for years, and you love it.
…but you won’t pay $12/month for it?
Yes, you are a freeloader. And you’ll inevitably keep bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no economic value to Slack, Discord, or wherever you end up next.
Being able to go back through two years of chats with your wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack. For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to.
I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though. While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing. It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.
> The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly.
The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price. There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal community (especially if even only some members could not afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working - probably only $1-2.
Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages community feelings), etc. Yuck.
For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and personal value from. Important business and career networking, fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even close.
This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click.
I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
-
But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...
The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.
Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
> "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats).
I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.
Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.
Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.
No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much.
Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel.
This is why I don't support any platform that does not also use an interoperable protocol. This includes Signal which won't let 3rd party clients connect to its servers. Protocol is a foundational element of communication. If you are designing a communication system that others that are strangers to your system can't talk to your users because you don't have a protocol, your system isolates users and is hostile to its very purpose:communication.
I mean really, I rant here a bit but have all these smart people never heard of adversarial compatibility?
For Matrix, I really wish they didn't associate with their flagship client, others who build clients have to also compete with the protocol authors, this should be a lesson to future communications systems designers.
Element [0] is the main/most popular client. FluffyChat [1] is also good. They both have web, Android, iOS, and desktop (Electron) apps. There are at least a dozen other clients but those are the only two I've tried so far.
For hosting, I believe the flagship host is Element Matrix Services [2]. It's made by the same organization that leads development (it is all FOSS) of Element and the reference server Synapse.
You can also self-host. Synapse is pretty slow and memory-hungry (it's written in Python), but for a small group it still fits pretty comfortably on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS. That's what I'm doing. It took less than an afternoon to set up (`apt install synapse` and then setting some config, mainly—there are a bunch of good guides online) and has been happily running ever since. Matrix is federated, so as long as you set up federation properly, you can seamlessly message anyone on any federated Matrix server. (Federation is opt-in.)
There's also Dendrite and Conduit, Matrix servers written in Go and Rust respectively, which are much leaner and faster. Both are still in beta and missing some features, but are definitely usable.
If you want to mess around with bots, I've had a lot of fun with both the Matrix Rust SDK [3] and JavaScript bot SDK [4]. Both are quite easy to get started with, and as of a few months ago both support E2EE pretty painlessly too (not totally pain-free though lol), which is cool.
Overall, the ecosystem is still maturing imo, but I've been using self-hosted Synapse and Element "in production"—it's me and my girlfriend's primary method of communication—for over a year now with only some minor UX hiccups (mostly issues decrypting E2EE messages in Element). I definitely encourage giving it a shot as long as you're willing to tolerate a few remaining growing pains.
If you end up using Element, beware one thing. Although it looks like Discord, it's not. Spaces may look like servers, but they do not contain channels.
A Space is a list, phone book, a map that lists a bunch of rooms so you can join many of them conveniently.
In addition to what the sibling comment said, Beeper is a great 'all in one' bridges type of software. The client is proprietary, but still interoperable with the larger Matrix network (and they contribute to upstream too).
This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history.
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post, for example.
In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
I don't mean to say that people were led to believe that free instances had no limits - just that this is a reversal of the nature of those limits. Groups that had planned based on the old limits are now in a tough spot.
I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.
You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.
Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money)
- never going to pay (families, online communities)
Changing this to 90-days plan:
- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack.
- Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day
- Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away
The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged...
One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and corresponding lack of client side history logging)
Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).
With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.
Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research.
The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.
I did work at one company where the main means of communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were also available. Of course this was a company that specialised in networking and communications products, so perhaps they were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great experience.
Yeah, even if file uploads are disabled and limited to sharing links (e.g. from Google Drive), screenshots will be very useful for communication, for a long while.
I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.
I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.
One of my main concerns about IRC, for the average user, is the lack of good modern clients. IRCCloud is pretty good, but that's also sort of missing one of the point with IRC, to me at least.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
Readit News
A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product.
If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms.
Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way, but that it will gone in the relatively short term. This is just reality.
Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.
You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start, that’s on you.
It doesn’t matter if the product is “worth it” because when you piss people off, they will gladly put in effort into migrating to another provider they can trust, because that’s what it’s all about: trust.
The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this, where Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive backlash.
It’s simply a consequence of just staring at the numbers, without properly understanding the psychological effect of taking something away from what is, despite the zero income but rather in a sense of trust, a customer. It’s just a customer you failed to get any revenue out of, and that’s your fault, not the customers.
Changing pricing pisses people off. Killing features pisses people off. Bad communication pisses people off. It’s really not that hard.
At the end of the day you’re making a deal with the devil with these overly optimistic loss-leaders, because you’re getting growth you never would have gotten otherwise. Failing to capitalize on that and then blaming the users while throwing features out the window is just not good business practice.
I'd argue that most companies understand that perfectly well. They have a generous free tier to drive growth. Once that growth is attained and demand starts to level off, it's time to trim the resources devoted to free and force users (to greater or lesser degrees) to either start paying or go use someone else. There's great wailing and gnashing of teeth for some period of time on HN, Twitter, etc. but life moves on.
It's a pretty predictable playbook. See also Heroku of late. It should probably also come as no surprise we're seeing a number of examples of this going on at the moment.
This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people will be pissed off but your profit is from those who stay (because they invested too much to just migrate away).
To be fair, I don't think Slack ever actually did this. Slack has always been pretty terrible for semi-public communities, and I don't think they did anything to promote this. Free slack has always had pretty annoying retention and storage limits, and others like limits on how many integrations you can add.
I think Slack's problem has been that reasonably (at least in the beginning before Discord got popular and copied all of Slacks features), people liked Slack from their experience at using it for work. Indeed, Slack's advantage has/had been in appealing to the hundreds/thousands of employees making something they would want to use.
> Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. A hundred million people hear a pop song on the radio and less than 1 percent will buy a copy. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in their homes. (In the former case, the purchased music is better–quality and convenience–than the free version, in the latter, the print is merely more accessible, but the math is the same–lots of visits, not a lot of conversion).
> We don't hesitate to ask a consultant or doctor or writer for free advice, but often hesitate when it involves a payment. ("Oh, I'm not asking for consulting, I just wanted you to answer a question…") And yes, I'm told that some people cut their own hair instead of paying someone a few bucks to do it. The bet a creator makes, then, is that when she gives away something for free, it will be discovered, attract attention, spread and then, as we saw in radio in 1969, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it.
> As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish when they pay for something when the free substitute is easily available and perhaps more convenient. Think about that–buying things now makes some people feel foolish. Few felt foolish buying a Creedence album in the 1970s. They felt good about it, not stupid. This new default to free means that people with something to sell are going to have to push ever harder to invent things that can't possibly have a free substitute.
> Creators don't have to like it, but free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive. The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.
Source: The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap - https://seths.blog/2011/06/discovery-free-145/
In what way have they back-pedalled? I'm affected by this and hadn't heard anything.
Consumer:
noun 1. a person who purchases goods and services for personal use.
It is sort of weird that people don't pay for a product, yet expect to be able to use it forever? It should be obvious that companies intend to convert "users" to "customers"?
You call them "consumers" but they are not given the have not paid for the services. Maybe "users" is more appropriate?
Do let us know what products you produce, and give away for free for years and dont want to monetize, it is just a charity thing for you even thought it costs you money to offer the service.
Yes, exactly. Companies can't tell consumers "it's free" and then be surprised people get upset when they change the terms. Do sufficiently sophisticated people know that free plans are always at risk? Yes. But clearly a pretty small percentage of people have fully internalized that, or there would be a lot fewer companies talking up their free plans in ways that suggest they're unlimited along important dimensions like time.
It's like 2001 in a lot of ways. Spesh the terrible economics of websites, or apps, or call them almost whatever they want, platforms, anything.
Giveaways bring users. Free beer people show up.
Like there's no business here. No excludability. It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck of a cent for, and now they want to charge...well guess people will go to IRC directly. And maybe there'll be an FOSS prettification.
And that'll be it.
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Especially considering all of Google's products/services, people still cry about Youtube ads/having to get Youtube premium.
People are so freaking self-entitled.
Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything.
It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.
My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay for services) start adopting a product.
It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last forever.
What did they do now?
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Dead Comment
Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.
And because there’s no way to know; the cost-cutters look at the numbers and say “cut the free plan enough to stop the hemorrhage”. Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts dropping and there’s no “clear reason why” and then it’s too late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust from scratch.
Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.
I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.
So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather those made by massive sales teams.
So tinkering with free plans downwards can have unforeseen consequences.
And with the amount of data slack uses so low and costs of bandwidth and spinning rust approaching zero - the idea that free tier limitation are anything other than create a painpoint for people to upgrade is a joke.
I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer free hosting for open source projects, including github actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source" part is enough of a filter?
They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone knows about slack.
Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction!
Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card.
Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!).
Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg problem though.
Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back.
People love credit cards and similar products because there is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some kind.
If you start building a system that supports micro payments, the cost of running such a service scales with the number of payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people running a system need a way to make money. They can't just lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing with chargebacks and fraud.
If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.
Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat grinder.
But there is still a profit incentive. Users who have been running a hobby or community on your SaaS today might be creating a startup or advising a corporate tomorrow.
So while the community might never need your paid product, the very same users might create separate, paying accounts.
Or to stop people moving to a competing product in order to stifle competitors.
Or to leverage a network effect to grow the user base to support investment.
Or because the company simply believes their product should be accessible for free.
Using a 'freemium' model is a common approach to revenue growth but it isn't the only reason for a free tier to exist.
I understand that to some companies their free or low-priced tiers end up being more of hassle than it's worth. But an $87 jump in order to access essential, previously available features seems like a good way to chop off your long tail of low volume users. Such a change could be deadly to a service's popularity and long-term prospects. Or maybe not.
There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community" slacks
The weird thing is that if that's the case, their target market doesn't really need a free tier at all - maybe a time limited demo. So I expect more restrictions in the future.
- "Free gigabytes of mail storage!"
- "Free communication with your teams"
- "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!"
The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate them. Once the competition is gone or investors demand more money destroy the tier/raise prices.
FB is trying to do that to Craigslist with marketplaces, Uber and Lyft and doing that with Taxis, AirBnb with... etc etc etc
- infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially;
- user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially;
- OpEx may increase, linearly;
- therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with astronomical wealth.
- and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual costs is pointless. Harmful even! We’re offering values, not collecting fees. We’re going for the moon! Forget about gases for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That’s irrelevant.
This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight. And now Houston is working on a solution.
Keeping the free tier indefinite (in time, if not in storage) helps to keep the product used, therefore top of mind, therefore the default choice for the latter when those decisions come around. Or, even where the user is not the decision maker, they will likely still be an advocate / non-complaining user at the least.
Just directly trying to convert the free usecases by time-limiting them so as to make many of them unusable feels like more of a short term 'upcoming quarters' geared strategy. For sure they will convert some 'real work' usecases here who are able to function in the current space-limited free tier, as well as saving some costs on compute and storage, and it may boost numbers in the short term.
But long term, is it the best strategy? If all those free users now switch to, say, discord, guess which tool gets picked more for the 'real work' usecases by those same people in 5 years. Over that timeframe, will the savings in resources have been worth it? I guess this analysis must have been done, but it feels very possible the answer will turn out to be no.
Salesforce is where products go to die. Slack will eventually get integrated in their Frankenstack and lose functionality. Salesforce can afford this strategy as long as they can keep charging $$$ for their CRM software that genuinely deserves its own circle in hell.
---
edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar argument might be made still
I have several free Slack groups that I've used for years. I haven't paid a cent. But it means I've also have Slack installed by default. At every company I've worked, I've supported using Slack because I'm a happy user and these companies have shelled out for paid plans.
It feels similar to how MS Office is given out for free to students and sold to companies.
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It also helps to keep some competitors out. One less toehold for newcomers to get traction in a market. Just look at the comments on the recent Heroku announcement - how many will now consider an alternative option.
More likely management have lost interest in growth and are looking to squeeze as much out of the existing customer base as possible. Not usually a good sign for investors or users.
The real question you have to ask is, "is my use of this service providing a sustainable benefit for the owner". If not, you can guarantee it will go away or change eventually. If it is, it's probably OK even if its free. For example, I don't expect Google search to go away, even though it's free.
All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed
Non-corporate users will migrate to Discord, Slack will cut resources costs = more money without new users. Everyone happy, just allow us to export data ;)
I've had data stored by Google and Dropbox for free for over a decade. Even Discord has stored all my messages and files for over half a decade.
the reason big SV VC are shilling web3 so hard.
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I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/
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I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.
Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.
Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.
Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.
(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
Discourse is 100% open source.
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
The docker install is super easy.
You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741
Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
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We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.
So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.
This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where each user can run their own version.
I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.
I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.
Honk honk.
> Along with these came many new business opportunities
Curious to hear more?
Also curious how long you've been running this stack and how large your organization is?
I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).
However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.
Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.
In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.
After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.
This person was having a service for free, having the possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an absurd mentality?
If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free!! Not even my taxes pay for it.
This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less than a cup of coffee) to support the host.
It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to twist the screws a little.
It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old.
I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a member of 3 paid slack myself.
Now we need to install a second app for this sort of stuff. As more people do that, it's going to mean more people are exposed to Slack alternatives and might move to them fully.
Making things free also makes them sticky for people using them in more than one way. They've now broken that.
…but you won’t pay $12/month for it?
Yes, you are a freeloader. And you’ll inevitably keep bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no economic value to Slack, Discord, or wherever you end up next.
Being able to go back through two years of chats with your wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack. For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to.
I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though. While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing. It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.
The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price. There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal community (especially if even only some members could not afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working - probably only $1-2.
Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages community feelings), etc. Yuck.
For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and personal value from. Important business and career networking, fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even close.
I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...
https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
-
But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...
The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.
Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats).
I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.
Transport of data was at that time trivial.
https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel.
This is why I don't support any platform that does not also use an interoperable protocol. This includes Signal which won't let 3rd party clients connect to its servers. Protocol is a foundational element of communication. If you are designing a communication system that others that are strangers to your system can't talk to your users because you don't have a protocol, your system isolates users and is hostile to its very purpose:communication.
I mean really, I rant here a bit but have all these smart people never heard of adversarial compatibility?
For Matrix, I really wish they didn't associate with their flagship client, others who build clients have to also compete with the protocol authors, this should be a lesson to future communications systems designers.
For hosting, I believe the flagship host is Element Matrix Services [2]. It's made by the same organization that leads development (it is all FOSS) of Element and the reference server Synapse.
You can also self-host. Synapse is pretty slow and memory-hungry (it's written in Python), but for a small group it still fits pretty comfortably on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS. That's what I'm doing. It took less than an afternoon to set up (`apt install synapse` and then setting some config, mainly—there are a bunch of good guides online) and has been happily running ever since. Matrix is federated, so as long as you set up federation properly, you can seamlessly message anyone on any federated Matrix server. (Federation is opt-in.)
There's also Dendrite and Conduit, Matrix servers written in Go and Rust respectively, which are much leaner and faster. Both are still in beta and missing some features, but are definitely usable.
If you want to mess around with bots, I've had a lot of fun with both the Matrix Rust SDK [3] and JavaScript bot SDK [4]. Both are quite easy to get started with, and as of a few months ago both support E2EE pretty painlessly too (not totally pain-free though lol), which is cool.
Overall, the ecosystem is still maturing imo, but I've been using self-hosted Synapse and Element "in production"—it's me and my girlfriend's primary method of communication—for over a year now with only some minor UX hiccups (mostly issues decrypting E2EE messages in Element). I definitely encourage giving it a shot as long as you're willing to tolerate a few remaining growing pains.
[0]: https://fluffychat.im/
[1]: https://element.io/get-started
[2]: https://element.io/matrix-services
[3]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk
[4]: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk
A Space is a list, phone book, a map that lists a bunch of rooms so you can join many of them conveniently.
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-196-signal-you-were-the-chose...
Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244795
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history.
Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.
In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
(I'm one of the Zulip developers.)
I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.
You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.
Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money) - never going to pay (families, online communities)
Changing this to 90-days plan:
- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack. - Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day - Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away
The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
Did you expect Salesforce to?
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One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.
Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).
With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.
The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.
Read that as "IRC has integrated anti-non-hacker technology."
Consider holding physical meetings with hard copies of reading material (or at least some Lorem ipsum) to occupy the other employees.
no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.
I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.
I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.