Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder.
Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense.
Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare.
Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.
In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.
However: I don’t want to have my data in the US for at least 3 years. For businesses outside the US: they simply cannot have their data in US anymore.
Build european/non-us would be a great argument to use this product.
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My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
Notifications need to be solid as well.
We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.
But good luck!
Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is great for single server (ie. no federation between multiple servers) and matrix/xmpp are good if you want the latter (ie federation)
Good to see some more options though but all the services I shared are open source. Not sure if this is open source.
I don't like to use closed source services (usually) because then I am still trusting trust but I am gonna be honest that Closed source services make more money at times so there is a trade-off for some businesses.
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We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings.
Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck.
Give me Teams
Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where we can communicate with anyone
Downside is, its total lock-in to microsoft.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.
Zoom just works on the other hand.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
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I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack
The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale
How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?
How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?
How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?
What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?
Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?
I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it
Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it
> or they increase their pricing by 1000%
1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely
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> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.
But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
* Fully open and interoperable protocol: We had it (XMPP), it was flawed, but at one beautiful moment in time it worked and using same protocol I could contact both google and facebook contacts. Then the companies decided "no, we would prefer to keep a walled gardens rather than make it easy to move to competition.
* Fully open source (no open core nonsense, latest Mattermost rugpull from OSS part users being one example why) chat platform with corporate backing and SaaS option - there is Matrix but afaik it is lacking feature-wise, tho I havent used it much. With plugin app store so it is possible to make and even sell integrations with other systems.
Second option seems more viable but it takes a lot of effort to make something as good as Slack or Discord
Would adopting the OP put you in a different position?
Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.
This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.
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I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous).
Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.
I don't want to screw over someone but I want my project to be sustainable and that too preferably without requiring VC funding ever.
Heck, I might even raise a kickstarter with all the info before I would require VC funding.
But also, I do feel like that there are services which can really reduce the cost of servers and I love cost optimizing servers (Read my other comment where I recommend some european services to them which might even be cheaper than their current stack but I do think that cf workers are very heavily subsidized by their CDN/security feature selling to entreprises where I have seen their contract sizes even go into 200_000$ or sorts)
I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack.
The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.
That's probably accurate in the US with the AI tech push to 996. You know, start at 9 on Monday and finish at 5 on Sunday.
It is a competetive advantage to reach our customers via their chat platform. Slack being the walled garden that is, it's basically a Slack-tax we pay.
I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps.
Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions.
If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P
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> $50 /month
> $300/year if paid annually
I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!
Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":
> Feature circus
> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?
This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.
People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.
It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is.
If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't.
>If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue.
All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams.
Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord.
Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing.
Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need.
The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).
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