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.

We tested Zulip not too long ago, in short - UI is not so good, but in general still useful: https://nixsanctuary.com/zulip-review-through-slack-glasses/

But it’s probably a small amount because SaaS has figured out to basically milk slacktivism. People will complain but pay.

It contains everything, incl. the files as far as I can see.

The file format is open, and there are many conversion tools out there.

On the other hand, you don't need to import anywhere at first. Just convert your files to Markdown, put the files aside and create your local knowledge base. You can import these Markdown files to somewhere new when you find the correct place, why not?

This is what keeps me at Evernote most. I can just move out in 2-3 hours, or in half day if I want.

I don't think they have note limits on exporting notebooks.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-Export...

The lack of a whole-account export is still an issue, but not as big as not being able to export notebooks.

I also do want "easy" things to be free, like a note-taking app.

Personally, I was pretty frustrated at that shift because I successfully and happily used old versions until it was “time” to update (2 then 4 (which was at the upgrade cost), then one more before I was pushed to the subscription). It always worked great. Tbh I’m still frustrated that their choice to self-host the syncing service became our costs (I used Dropbox just fine and that didn’t cost them anything), but now that I’m past the sticker shock (my costs easily went up 8X) I’m more comfortable with the stability of their company and breathing room they have to build the hard technology.

Thanks for bringing it up: 1Password is a necessary example for this debate.

Regarding building in their own sync, I think it’s actually a good thing. Naively syncing encrypted files can’t achieve the reliability of conflict resolution that a semantically aware app-level sync can.

On a side note, I moved away from Dropbox a couple years ago as their product became bloated as they seek growth with increased desperation. That is not a trait that I want in a company I allow to install kernel extensions on my machine.

I bet it was the App Store and the Mac Store where you couldn't pay for updates that started them thinking about a subscription model.

Subscriptions are highly fetishized by the current accounting system, because they seem more predictable basically, and plus there's a lag between no longer using a service and discountinuing the subscription, that's like four free months at the end with no support calls no use no opening the app, nothing. Not even electricity costs. For that user in those months you might as well have 0% uptime. It's cheap. Except billing because you keep getting paid! And when they leave it's generally not a chargeback, plus you can be a bitch to unsubscribe from to the narrowest extent permitted by the law, ask Google not to lead people to the answer to how to unsubscribe on the first try or SEO it, in some way, hey that's solid business plusses and minusses. Especially the plusses for the first-person, the business owner, the first-person in economics too, for whom the price and quantity axes on economics charts are switched. There's also the idea that for a business to be a business it has to be repeatable. It's a sound idea.

And there's tons of businesses that make sense as a subscription. If you want to reward a business for doing a great job, try to subscribe to it under some pretense because that revenue will go much farther in business terms to strengthen it. I've done that, I did that for Beorg. I already bought all their unlockables. Even the ones I didn't want. Tipped them (him? I think it's a one-man show) a bunch of times. Then I subscribed thinking of all the good that subscription would do for the startup, instead of eg tipping.

Then it broke and I couldn't use it, like the calendars got out of whack. Plus, it's a todo app, ie I nag myself with it. It's like an alarm clock. There's the alarm clock effect.

Alarm clock effect: no matter what song you choose for your alarm clock, Beethoven's 9th the Beatle's biggest hit ("Yesterday" I think it is), any song any any song: in a week you will hate it. If it's your alarm song you will hate it. Hatred. Somethings are beloved, this is behated. I think it takes one year of not hearing it in any context to recover from it for every single time it wakes you up early. It's all in the interest of not getting fired for 8 more hours or not getting denied from an institution. Protects against existential threat of sleeping in.

Agendas are similar. And password protectors are similar. Existential threats. But in the case of password protection, I don't want a subscription, then what happens when I can't pay? Basically lock me out of everything, either explicitly or with hexes or nags or giving me a longer and longer runaround every time, slowbanning me, that kinda shit. For password protection, it needs to be one-and-done or work for some long event horizon, like ten or twenty years.

Especially because of the intricate relationship between cryptography and torture, in the endgame. If your crypto is strong and the bad guys are still determined to get your information the only option is to torture you. Elite cryptographers talk about this all the time.

So any half-assed password manager has to be really strong in that scenario. And it was, I bought 1Password in 2008 I think and it worked great, I felt very secure despite getting hacked by amnestic interrogation, which I had no idea of for like a decade. 1Password of 2009 failed only under torture. That is the exact unique kind of next-level shit that is a legitimate situation for a password manager to fail.

1password is basically a bank. A password bank. They should act like a bank instead of acting like I don't know patreon dancer.

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).

Companies are not some altruistic group, and this pattern of "free to get you hooked then convert to a paying customer" is almost as old as computing itself.

What is odd here people depending on slack for search history and not creating a proper KB?

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.

The problem is that the per-user model is really crap for public communities.

> 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/

What the companies are doing here is that they are trying to kill paid competition, hold on longer and raise prices once competitors don't exists. They really dont have a standing to complain about situation they themselves created in the hope that competition will die sooner and in the hope users will be locked too much without any chance.

> Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in their homes.

Now, this analogy does not work at all, because going by the painting in the museum in no way implies you would want it at home. And that many people dont go to the museums in the first place ... and those who go are more likely to buy some serious art. The other reason it does not work is that people have tons of inexpensive art in their homes. It is ridiculously competitive market. Posters, cups bought only for their pictures, figurines, people buy all of that.

You are talking from a buyer's perspective (the museum visitor) whereas he is talking from the seller's perspective (the museum / artist). The seller hopes that by allowing you free or cheap access to the art, you may be tempted to buy a copy of it or some memento of it (which is one of the ways museums / artists make money).

It increases prestige and pride of ownership for actual buyers.

In what way have they back-pedalled? I'm affected by this and hadn't heard anything.

(And, if you’re affected by Ukraine vs. Russia, deferred indefinitely.)

I have now selected it, thanks!

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en

For those watching at home, if you signed up to pay you may still be able to switch back.

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.

As a user or consumer, it an unpleasant surprise that feels like a bait and switch when the free product you used now requires payment without prior warning.

At least smaller apps are upfront about the duration of the free trial, and there are no surprises (or uproar) there.

But, this move makes it pretty clear they're never going to, so I'm finally going to bite the bullet and set up Matrix.

[Just to add to this, I've had my users asking me why we're on Slack when everybody else is on Discord. (Most of us use Slack at work, so it's convenient in that sense.) I've been interacting with the company since Glitch/Tiny Speck. But, with pushback from users and from the company, at this point I just can't justify Slack for our particular use case.]

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.

It's a lot more than that. Addimg a persistent message history and multi-device identities to IRC is pretty huge, otherwise bouncers would never have existed.

And the number of paying customers shows that people are, in fact, very willing to pay for it. Slack just really sucks at b2b marketing, which is why Teams eclipsed them so quickly.

But I agree, in the eyes of the business suits this doesn't matter at all as long as it ticks boxes on a spec sheet.

The basic reason is because I got tortured with an amnestic lobotomy. I had a very marketable curriculum until that point, and after that if for instance I was asked where I worked during April 2009, I would ask "are we talking about the Gregorian Calendar, that shit?"

So for me you have to provide amazing shit for me to subscribe to anything. And it can be done. Not often. I can't have 7000 apps draining me $5 a month. That is why I identified a natural limit to the number of web-app subscription-model startups there could be, the first limit was remembering all the credentials to use them, which 1Password and similar surpassed. One user here talked about having 800 web app username-password credentials on his 1Password, obviously doesn't pay any scratch for most of them. Veteran of the freemium model, like I became a veteran of the psych ward in my remarkably successful struggle under torture, including not caving to the torture.

I talk about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620302

So my segment of the market, I'm gone. Neither feature you mentioned seems...wantable. And that goes for most web apps, like I predict their business model and then operate on that basis. So for instance most VPN's are, as a business, honeypots. Like yeah you can steal from the labels who steal music from the artists, that you can do, but for tricky nitty gritty, nah. It's just too obvious, it's just too instantaneous an erection the founder gets thinking of cutting deals with Kuwaiti Intelligence during the commercial of them going on TV saying "We never have and never will cut a deal with Kuwaiti Intelligence."

So with the paying users it's like ice on land, they need the ice on the sea in order to hold them back from falling into the sea. Non-paying users provide a lot of value to Slack, in that for instance you can do a trial release on them to debug your product for the paying users. For example.

"Slack just really sucks at b2b marketing" well compared to Microsoft yes. Slack sucks at marketing compared to Microsoft, for B2B. I buy that. The guy Butterfield (Stuart? Something) was busy getting on magazine covers like it is still the previous millennium, which for businesses loses credibility.

So I went to slack.com and tried finding what they charged, they wanted me to see all their flair first. So I went to the URL which said https://slack.com/features and replaced "features" with "pricing" and there it was, the chart with the numbers they want. So they want $8.00 USD a month for their product, and assumptively propose you buy it for the year at a pro rata price of $6.67 as the default. I looked for their asterisk at the bottom of the page, but it wasn't there. No this was a javascript asterkisk, no relation to asterisks in eg legal document. So $8.00 a month, per user.

So that right there is a turn-off to an informed buyer, which B2B is. There's typically a designated person in the office for this sort of purchase and she herds the company's users through the spam, the spear-fishing, the shitty deals like this one, every everything. Apparently Teams is in fact the better product, and that might be because the terms of service aren't demonic (though I vaguely recall them yes being demonic which is why I couldn't use it, but then from the dodginess in revealing the price I divine Slack's terms are demonic too).

But whatever. In for a penny, in for a pound, sell your soul, no reason to pray. Microsoft already has telemetry on like blood type in the first 18 minutes so it's not an additional leak to work with them.

And that's saying as someone conflicted about the company, I like the way they didn't fuck up github for instance. Didn't nix it. Like they never even bought it. It works better now, in fact, I can tell it has more integrity and reliability. Backend stuff.

You could argue that these are freeloaders and not Slack's problem, but I'd be wary about sending so many users running into the arms of their competition. Part of the appeal of Slack was that I could use one app for everything, which is increasingly not the case.

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.

Yeah… and now they’re grown to a size where everyone knows the product and they don’t need to get people interested from scratch in the same way.

Bullshit. It's unclear communication and indecisiveness that pisses people off. If you can't afford it, there is no reason for you to give something for free and then later take it away. People who are paying will feel that samething will happen to them in other ways. You want consistency.

These users will either move to on-premise systems or pay to a competitor now.

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.

Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on dropping these types of customers.

There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few thousand active users on the free plan was basically unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly, isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.

It has no business being the default chat of open source projects. Especially when there's something amazing and fully free like Matrix.

I think a fair amount of their actual sales come from non-tech companies reluctantly paying for it because their developers are pushy about wanting it. Those developers want it because they were exposed to it in some context where it was free.

Lacking that pressure, those companies will just tell their developers to use something they already have...MS Teams or whatever.

If a small opensource dev group gets pissed at slack, and those people have a say in a chat solution at their workplace (paid plans there of course), pissed people won't recommend slack but other alternatives.

What did they do now?

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.

Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidating in a single client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.

I’d suggest the answer to that is probably no - an open source community is by its very nature going to want costs and overheads down, and all but the largest non profits and NGOs are going to try to get by by stitching together free tools and services. The one that is paying in your example is the one in Slack’s target who is going to be most likely to pay. Does Slack care about a few open source communities potentially churning? Probably not. Does it care about lowering average Time to Revenue? Absolutely.

None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.

Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone on free slack is on free slack because they aren't willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for their competitors.

2. Every private group chat might involve people who never used something like it before. For these people the software they use first is the baseline. And they are more likly to recommend the solution they already know to a organistation that is willing/able to pay for a higher tier.

People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to buy slack for work.

The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the employees requesting it.

Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack because of the employees.

But if the new employees will not even know slack exists… they will not be asking for it.

tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived as good tools for work;

and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to be good for use for personal reasons.

tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes, which it is

someone hav[ing] used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo

They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is pretty badly handled.

These tools built themselves on being free (as in beer) up to a certain extent, and now they're big enough, and trust their momentum, so they change their stance.

This will inevitably create some changes, both how they perceived and being developed, but we'll see...

However, web application development is much easier and scalable infrastructure is democratized now. Their moat may not be as robust as they imagine.

This will get interesting.

Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.

For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.

(they’re technically in beta but a bunch of popular discords use them)

Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples. Start there and we can have a proper discussion, otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-said'.

In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.

Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off

The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I can mute channels and categories I’m uninterested in, but how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor discoverability?

We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it’s worth.

Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.

Some people like this kind of constant distraction, though.

I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.

Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.

About IRC you're obviously wrong :)

Discord is the best thing I’ve found. My group and I love it.

I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too.

For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.

Most apps have no good open source alternatives.

There are dozens of products and countless open protocols to base new products on. We could even just use IRC again.

The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people on shitty internet connections.

The client is always responsive and snappy.

Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more information on screen.

Their dark mode is much better.

Their code display/highlighting is better.

The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much better than others.

It's way easier to find where notifications come from.

Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.

Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or something, because having to make a fake new thread just to comment on an existing locked thread would make me rage quit

Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to everyone in your server.

Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.

To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @developers and add only those seven, not bothering the other 3.

You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read #project but not post, while those that are neither @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same people in totally different groups and with different roles.

Way more customizable than by just having public/private channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.

And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.

Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.

Users pay for convenience and for more, not just slightly better.

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.

Why else do you think students get software or checking accounts for free or much lower cost? The net LTV of getting users accustomed to your product who later evangelize it for free is priceless.

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?

Genuine question, has there been any evidence to substantiate your claim?

[1] https://github.com/features/copilot#what-data-has-github-cop...

You just provided the evidence. I was incorrect to use the term "all the code", but they clearly and openly used GitHub code to train Copilot

They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone knows about slack.

This is the same with Slack/Discord. If I can attract bright individual to work for me if I offer them Discord, I don't really mind switching to Discord.

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.

I point out Bitcoin as it is non-reversible, and there is no central agency you can complain to if you get your bitcoins stolen. This prevent adoption from much of the public.

I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10.

Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".

That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.

If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that the final price is

a) somewhat predicable

b) usually not ruinous

It would work better.

Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode and it's working well for them.

But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a hard spending limit.

currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-...

That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.

I think Brave has the right general idea.

Fund an account and then split that per month among the sites I visit, or according to a breakdown of my own preference.

I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.

I should probably clarify that by "impossible" I really meant "does not make business/economic sense". You can do microtransactions with individuals, but if you're spending €2 (rough estimate) per transaction for invoicing, accounting, VAT processing, etc, it no longer makes any sense. Thus "impossible".

It should have been possible for Slack to start the new limitations on new workspaces only. This term, because I started the change too late, I will continue to use Slack without enthusiasm while keeping a shadow archive (possibly in piazza but they have also begun to charge for larger classes). For next semester we will find and use a different service.

It's per user sadly. Apparently $8/mo now if paying monthly. Of course if you go to their pricing page they lie and give you the price for paying yearly.

If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.

Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.

The one most people use. SWIFT.

And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of the world's business is happening there and like the crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-banked".

How, pray tell, would a cryptocurrency help here? You have all the crypto disadvantages (either untested or slow or scams or boiling the planet...) plus the same issue with adoption. We already have banks and they already have bank accounts. We have SWIFT, SEPA, etc. They know how to talk to each other. Get them to modify an existing protocol or make a new one for microtransactions.

It's a super hard task but with crypto you still have that super hard task (adoption) plus crypto itself (a million drawbacks).

It's not scientific and it's not engineering.

You solve a problem with the simplest equivalent solution, no more.

Crypto is like God. It gets sprinkled over every discussion. There's a reason science doesn't go: "A equals B plus God" to prove anything.

You put it better, just have any layer on top of IBANs. 0 need for crypto.

Perhaps if the user has multiple bank accounts linked, they would have to choose one, to avoid leaking to my bank that I'm making a crypto payment.

Of course, a crypto transaction has a significantly lower chance of being compatible since there's no foreign currency team working at the bank - if the website wants a payment in BitWhatsits and my primary wallet is in DOGEMONEY 20000!!!!! then it's up to the user or at least the extension to figure out the routing. Probably, the website would offer a different button to pay with each supported cryptocurrency, so the user would choose. They'll be accustomed to that, being a cryptocurrency and all.

A working standard could simply define "seller endpoints", "buyers bank endpoint", "supported payment protocol" and a message passing system and let the parties figure it out.

Not global, but few things are in the world of finance.

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

I’ve also advocated for Slack at my company of several hundred employees, at multiple previous companies, and would’ve continued to at future companies. Mostly because they’ve had goodwill and been a joy to use in my personal life.

But now I’m mad at them, and going to move to a new chat platform, with my partner, on our tiny little instance.

Will me being mad at Slack affect their bottom line? Probably not today… but when more people like me have moved past Slack and see it as old annoying tech, maybe it’ll start to have an affect. We’ll see.

Free tiers exist to help with onboarding and testing, the existence of free plans that allow more or less indefinite usage is an obvious mistake for something like Slack IMO.

I think if Slack had shown up with a free plan at 90 days history (really, 90 days/5 GB would be the "reall" thing), then people wouldn't bat an eye. It feels obvious that the solution here would be to grandfather old workspaces into the old model but .. shrug.

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.

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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.

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.