Slack is Increasing Its Prices and Making Big Changes To Its Free Plan (theverge.com) 34
Slack is putting its prices up in September, alongside some big changes to its free plan. It's the first price increase since Slack launched in 2014, but will only affect users of Slack's "Pro" plan. From a report: On September 1st, monthly Pro subscriptions will increase from $8 to $8.75 per user per month, and annual Pro subscriptions will increase from $6.67 to $7.25 per user per month. The price increases will only impact Pro customers worldwide, and not companies on Slack's Business Plus or custom enterprise plans. [...] Slack is also making some big changes to its free plan. Currently, free Slack servers show the last 10,000 messages and up to 5GB of uploaded content. From September 1st, Slack is changing this to show the last 90 days of messages and uploads, with no limit on how many messages have been sent or the amount of uploaded content.
Price increase to pay for managing technical debt? (Score:1)
Re:Price increase to pay for managing technical de (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate the concept of Electron for most applications as much as the next geek; but for a messaging app like Slack its actually fit for purpose.
People WANT advanced formatting and layout controls. They want to do things like past tables and tables with images in them etc. They want hyperlinks, they want animated gifs, etc. It really is essentially and wiki that you watch edited in real time. In short it actually does all the things in terms of layout a browser needs to do..
So delivering it by wait-for-it embedding a browser is not such a nutty idea. Chrome/FF are both moving targets and then you have users that insist on suing some also ran like Safari etc, shipping the browswer with the app to avoid breakage or at least offering an option as an alternative to the web version that is sure to work also isn't totally stupid.
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That embedded browser doesn't need to move, in fact you don't want it to move. You only want it to offer a set of features you can leverage. By picking the browser you know what to feed it and since you control the markup you can feed it exactly what it wants.
So they could have picked any old browser engine to embed it.
Amaya perhaps, or arachne for shits and giggles.
Chromium is where we are at now. Might be more than is needed but you counter proposals don't really suit. The former is discontinued that latter is probably as well but even if its not probably isnt very portable and won't work on a variety of platforms people developing Electron Apps and Slack specifically want to support. Neither actually supports a lot of the event driven dynamic updating needed. I guess you could have picked some archaic Gecko release to use from 2k8 or something; but then you'd be
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The problem is not embedding a rendering engine, it's that Electron is a painfully slow piece of resource hogging shit.
I pine for the days of having Skype for Business. I'd happy forgo the ability to paste tables into messages in exchange for an app that doesn't use 15% of the CPU just to render some text (in this case MS Teams, but Slack is no better).
If Electron packaged a purpose built web rendering engine then it would be great, but that's not what it's done. It's embedded entire frigging Chrome.
Wait for the infomercial ... (Score:2)
Slack is putting its prices up in September, alongside some big changes to its free plan.
The subscription is still free, but will include a separate monthly handling fee.
[Like on those late-night infomercials... Get a second one free, just include a separate handling/processing fee.]
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Totally free! Just needs $35 postage and handling.
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Just what are they handling? Their balls?
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[Like on those late-night infomercials... Get a second one free, just include a separate handling/processing fee.]
My daughter and I were laughing at one of those just last night... It didn't say "processing", it just said, "Free, with payment of second fee".
FOSS alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, Mattermost [mattermost.com] has a FOSS alternative [github.com] with most of the same functionality as Slack.
Here is a list of other FOSS alternatives to Slack. [itsfoss.com]
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Code (FOSS or not) is not 'an alternative' to a functional, supported service.
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Code (FOSS or not) is not 'an alternative' to a functional, supported service.
Maybe, but it is an alternative to Slack.
Re: FOSS alternatives (Score:2)
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Cloud archiving, connection with a bunch of other services, easy cross-connection with other organizations that use Slack.
But convenience of operation is a big one. Sure, you can set up a server running Mattermost or any of a dozen other services. Then you have to have someone who oversees it, makes sure it's backed up, answers the call if the server crashes, and someone who does all that while the primary is on vacation or in the hospital after getting hit by a bus. All of that costs money. Does it cost le
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My workplace switched from Mattermost to Slack and IMO it was a downgrade. Mattermost had a better user-experience and no anti-features like that *#&$*#&$ Slackbot.
So the free plan becomes mostly useless (Score:2)
Clever of them from a revenue maximization perspective.
Annoying as heck to those with lightweight or non technical work use cases for free slack, who might have then recommended slack to their workplaces.
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Yeah... we're probably switching to Discord.
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Ok, but there's technically nothing to make Discord unable to do the same for their Free service (non-boosted servers);
once their competitors add this type of limitation..
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In that case we'll move again.
Re: So the free plan becomes mostly useless (Score:2)
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That goes without saying.
Thing is, our actual Slack server is used by 12 people, and we post around 3-4 messages per day on average. One essential feature we need is to be able to go back in history and refer to entries posted a year ago, or two years ago.
Slack free tier changes mean all history over 90 days ago is gone, therefore Slack becomes unusable.
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> because you can't see any old uploaded materials or messages.
It's always been like this, they're just changing it from how far back you can go by number of messages to 90 days.
At least it's predictable now, you never really knew when you'd hit that 10k message point.
For really chatty accounts, this is an improvement, for fairly quite ones this will be more of a set-back (since they may take years to hit 10k messages, so their history would be mostly intact).
Last I used it, the limit included pinned mes
WTF is Slack? (Score:2)
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I just don't know a single person that uses it.
I, however, know many married people who use it.
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I don't know what it is. I gather it's some sort of electronic service, possibly an email handler or something. But just what...(Well, if I were really curious, I suppose I could do a search, but what a LOUSY excuse for a story.)
Slack is UDP (Score:2)
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Netflix playbook (Score:5, Interesting)
Like Netflix, Slack still thinks it's on the 'upswing' of growth and user interest. But the reality is that (both) their times have peaked and they have squandered the time they could have used to make a better app, or deliver better content, to futz around with who knows what. Crap like Netlifx'x "Play something" which is utterly useless and Slack juts piling on UI garbage by the truckload while avoiding features that take effort like decent search and message organization. .
Worst still, competitors are arriving at the gates. Netflix's lunch got eaten by Disney and Paramount.. And Slack has got to be watching Microsoft in the rear view mirror steadily gaining on them.
So what do these firms do now? Raise prices to maintain the profits of a shrinking user base. What shrinks a user base faster than rising prices? ...hmm if only there was some sort of chart or curve that you could plot price vs. demand...
I am a geezer (Score:2)
I don't even know what Slack is. A long time ago I ran Slackware...I'm sure his has nothing to do with that.
All I know for sure is: You're pink to Bob till he sees the green of your money!
Slack missed it's opportunity with COVID. (Score:2)
Slack never managed to take the next steps.
It never managed to integrate video conferencing properly.
It never managed to achieve office suite integration.
( People will argue the above but in practice I'm not seeing either used. )
At the start of Covid both Slack and Zoom were poised to take it all. If Slack and Zoom joined forces they could have fended off MS teams.
Both Slack and Zoom had the lead, they had the performance, they had the scale. Teams was struggling to run on most business grade laptops. N
Wait a second... (Score:2)
... companies are actually *PAYING* to waste their own productivity?
WTF?