Their product is built on the Slack platform. They probably need (and want) to be paid users if not for anything more than having a better understanding of their customer.

Why you’d start (and fund?!) a business built entirely on a “hip” chat client, in a world where we’ve seen how walled gardens have ruined business models overnight (mobile app stores) is the real question. But it’s not my money (or apparently the blog authors either). So spend away!

The reason is simple: Because there is a demand and multiple companies have already built successful products through this. Companies born from platforms is nothing new and makes plenty of sense.

I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this perspective is wrong, or more precisely, focusing on this type of optimization will make your business less likely to succeed.

The problem is ROI, $227 a month adds up to $2724 a year, which, assuming you're in the US (or similar cost of living area), is just such a small sum of money, relative to even just living expenses, that even spending time thinking about it, let alone actually using less efficient solutions, is going to negatively impact your business's chances of success.

I say this as someone who is really drawn to optimizing out these expenses. So I don't want it to be true, but I truly believe focusing on these types of costs lowers my businesses chances of success.

Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation.

Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?

We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure.

There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected.

There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well.

But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely.

To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them.

You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.

Cost aside, it just complicates your workplace and makes your success dependent on the continued performance of other companies. What if slack pushes an update that everyone in your office hates, or shuts down as a company one day? In the words of Bane, it would be extremely painful, for you.

However, if you were old school and used IRC, you would have 40 years of documentation to help you solve any issues, and you probably won't have very much issues to begin with since people have been publicly using the protocol for 40 years and improving the experience. Plus it would be free and you wouldn't be dependent on anyone but yourselves staying in business.

Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile.

You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".

My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.

> Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels

If you're using Slack solely for the purpose of talking to your co-founder over a few categorized channels then the price is definitely not worth it over using email etc. IMO - unless you're willing to pay $13 a month to click on reaction emojis.

However Slack's ability to be used as a sort of centralized dashboard for most if not all of the other services listed on the blog article might just be convenient enough to merit that price point. In addition to supporting customers and probably being able to chat with them right through the app, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they've set up one-click integrations for the other paid suites including Sentry, LinkedIn Sales, Hubspot.

Emojis are like coffee. They make doing a tedious thing more exciting.

There are parts of work that are intrinsically exciting. But there are also parts of work that are just tedious, and you just need to get through them.

Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

It doesn't have the "enterprisy" integrations that give companies control they want, such as where you integrate logins with your AD/SSO/whatever system. You could kick employees that leave from your server, but that doesn't mean there's no company information in their DMs with other employees. You can insist people set up a work account, but you still can't deactivate it when they leave.

You can't enforce password length requirements, or whatever your security team recommends this year.

You can't disable parts of the offering, like voice chat, to enforce people use hangouts or whatever your company wide solution is.

At the same time, things companies may want employees to do easily but gaming communities don't want, such as allowing any user to create a channel are not possible with Discord's permission model.

If you want users to see only self-selected subsets of information, you can't really. You could break your company's chat across multiple servers, but this is tedious compared to just having channels users can join or not. For example, in my last employer, I was in 40 or so channels out of several thousand.

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I think for a startup or small business, none of these things are that important. But for medium or large companies, they become more of a problem.

Honestly, it's probably because it's marketed towards gamers. It's a really useful product for sure but the gamer marketing definitely affects people's perception.

I think in the past they did make a point of saying they don't support business use. As in, it's fine if you want to, but don't pin your daily success on it and complain if it breaks.

I use it at home and it does occasionally go a bit weird and need a reboot, or stop sending notifications on my phone. Not a big deal for me.

Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

This. For any serious discussion you need to have topics and async slow-motion discussions for them. Like forums.

Slack should definitely add a 'forum-like' kind of channel before someone creates a new 'forums with native client' product.

If you need threads, there's always email. No need to reinvent the wheel solely because the app is written in electron and gives off pleasing beeps.

That could be seen as an advantage

For what it's worth, most gaming startups I know (including my own) seem to use Discord.

It’s part marketing, part functionality. For example, with Slack you can filter sign ups based on email. That being said, I would still love a discord for work where chat and invites overlays on top of a working document.

Always wondered that myself. I can't "get it" since I'm not a Slack user (nor a Discord user), though I interacted with both

Is it still required to have a phone to sign up for discord? That's what puts me off.

It's not required for everyone — only people Discord find suspicious for some reason.

That's never been required as far as I know?

Anyway...you all have phones right ;-)

We all have Social Security Numbers too (in the US). Doesn’t mean we should share them with anyone who asks.

Negative stigma?

I personally don't use it because everywhere I've seen it previously is in gaming/twitch communities.

1. Can't share large files with discord

2. Customer service doesn't respond quickly even with nitro plan

3. Confusing UX

I agree with the point about tool fetishization: it could be just another form of "playing house". That said, optimizing these sums of money is also not going to make you successful. If the tools are providing value then use them and don't fret over $0 vs $10 vs $20 a month. The more important thing is keeping cognitive load low by using simple systems and driving mental focus on the right things.

To take an example: I wouldn't bat an eye at paying for Slack for a two-person startup because A) the integrations means I get centralized notifications and search for updates to all the tools I'm using essentially for free with no ops overhead, B) the mobile push notifications and per-channel settings are nicely tunable to ensure I'm on top of things without getting notification fatigue, and C) I'm already on 10 other Slacks, so it's not adding much overhead to my life overall.

> 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype

Also, Email is federated, and your communications are not under the control of a single company. Email is easier to archive as well.

Looks like their product is built specifically for Slack.

Also, I wonder how much time they waste switching between tools and managing them (accounts, settings & preferences, payments, upgrading plans, checking release notes, news & other notification emails, etc).

Don’t using 28 productivity tools make you less productive eventually?

7. Github ($7 / month) — has unlimited private repos for a while now up to 3 collaborators.

I agree. All those tools support more roles that two people could reasonably cover. Might they need some of these tools eventually? Of course - once there two or more additional team members.

As it is, they need a tool for keeping track of all these tools.

Figma is pretty awesome. I’m on the free licence but deffo see the value. You can collaborate on designs, hand off easily to devs and build quick prototypes.

The tool pays for itself pretty fast.

It's pretty cool but I wish scrolling around wasn't infinitely slow.

sentry does have a free level which works out decently for small/medium volumes, but yeah, self-hosting might be cheaper.

4. Cloudflare - maybe better safe than sorry since you need Pro for the WAF.

The $20/mo upgrade has more than that: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features

You need to pay it just for Cloudflare SSL to work in all browsers which is pretty necessary if you use that feature at all. But the plan has various other goodies like more page rules, the "Polish" image compression, and rate limit rules.

SSL status isn't changed with the pro plan. If you want non-SNI clients to be able to visit your site, you need the Business plan which assigns IPs to your website that serve your SSL even without SNI present, but this is usually unnecessary as the non-SNI client base gets smaller every year. All of the major browsers support modern TLS and SNI so the free plan will work as long as you don't need to support users running XP or odd mobile browsers on 5+ year old Android.

I disagree.

Slack is so much more than a discussion app.

With integrations you can monitor your whole app in one place:

- sales

- bizdev

- ops

- deployment

- support

Same goes for Notion.

We pay $16 but it is an awesome bang for the buck:

- crm

- collaborating blog draft

- project management

- finance

- knowledge base

And again, in one place.

Or you can set up email notifications and do the exact same thing in any mail client, like people have been doing for ages.

But that's not cool any more I guess.

I think you underestimate how pervasive and usable Slack is over email.

Email is still fine and necessary but is mostly for long form asynchronous communication. Organizing email inboxes is a pain. Spam is a pain.

Slack is pre-organized and automatically integrated with a dozen other tools. It’s the beating heart of a distributed organization.

nothing to do with "cool". I could never go back to email after using slack-like software. It's so much more efficient.

That is debatable. For sending IMs, sure. For a lot of other stuff it's pretty noisy and even with search is still less organisable than email.

It's debatable which is why the snark of "guess email isn't cool anymore :(" is such tired commentary, suggesting everyone is just an idiot lemming for not having email enlightenment.