"While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again)."

Not everybody wants to pay to put their potentially sensitive data onto somebody else's systems, where they can't control the security of that data.

The one thing in terms of security that is even a blip on my radar is that slack does not encrypt data at rest (disks). [1](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808)

Their reason that they couldn't search through data if it were encrypted is not true. They are using AWS, and can simply use EBS encrypted volumes (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryp...). Should be an easy flag to turn on.

The only thing that's on your radar. Do you speak for everyone else's needs or interests?

Not sure what exactly that buys in terms of security.

Both Slack and Amazon can steal all the data without being detected, regardless of whether the servers are encrypting it or not, since if the server can decrypt it, so can Amazon (just scan VM memory for the key from the hypervisor).

Slack itself was reinventing the wheel, so it's pretty hypocritical to bash others for doing likewise. Also, the OP gave some pretty good reasons why relying on an external proprietary service might be a bad idea. If you're happy with Slack that's great, but that's no excuse for being so gratuitously negative about alternatives.

It is a closed source proprietary software that requires to give up all your secrets to an unknown third party, and also pay per user for some of the features (and thus an unlimited amount if users are not employees).

Their ToS is also as abusive as it can possibly be, trying to take away your right to sue them in favor of arbitration (!), allowing them to terminate your service at any time, send your data to anyone unencrypted, disclaiming all liabilities and warranties, disallowing any content that is "objectionable", etc.

I don't think price is most people's problems. I think usually it's just

1. they don't want to depend on a third party's existence. If Slack Inc. goes under or gets sold to eBay, the team won't have Slack anymore, and

2. they want privacy. They don't want conversations being watched or sold, especially to competitors.

I'm pretty sure that's all it is. Someone correct me if I'm wrong though please.

Well, it's interesting that anyone would be concerned about (1) meanwhile probably 99% of open source projects use e.g. github, bitbucket, gmail, etc...

If it's an open source project then shouldn't everything be out in the open anyways? If that's not the case then it implies it's a private project in which case there should be a budget...

Maybe Im wrong though?

> If you want the premium features, their pricing is very affordable.

"very affordable" is up to each person to define. One of those premium features is a history with more than 10,000 messages.

I frequently interact with at least 25 people just to do my job. The cheapest paid plan is $6.67 per user per month. That works out to $2000 a year. And that's only for the people I work with on a regular basis. Sure, I could afford that, but it's certainly not trivial. Email looks like a good alternative at that price.

$6.67/month is less than $0.33/day (~20 workdays/month)!

That's an trivial amount to pay for effective communications in my book.

$0.00/forever is also trivial, with so many OSS alternatives out there.

How much time do you have to spend setting it up, maintaining it, documenting your set up, etc? While OSS has no upfront costs, it does cost in terms of dev and admin time.

You pay that for every Slack user, no matter how many or few messages you exchange with them. I don't think someone else is going to pay $6.67 to replace ten email messages.

"I frequently interact with at least 25 people just to do my job"

Frequently, not ten messages in total.

Email works fine for non important sporadic communication.

I'm a member of community Slack rooms with hundreds of people. It would cost thousands of dollars a month to switch to paid accounts. That's way too high for volunteer open source projects to pay.

Iteration is how software moves forward.

If slack didn't "re-invent" IRC, it wouldn't exist.

Also, not everyone is comfortable having data exist on a 3rd party system, that they have no audit access to. This is the fundamental difference between "founders" and people who know how systems work.