Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by ghaff on Saturday August 27, 2022 @09:12AM (#32618562)

>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.

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.

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by ryeights on Saturday August 27, 2022 @09:37AM (#32618829)

Note that Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce.

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by ghaff on Saturday August 27, 2022 @09:44AM (#32618924)

True. So the timing is probably not entirely coincidental.

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by gdilla on Saturday August 27, 2022 @12:27PM (#32620646)

Yup, and they think pissing people off is worth it (for their expected benefit). And... they're probably right. People have short term memories and other things to worry about.

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by nxss on Saturday August 27, 2022 @02:02PM (#32621495)

They are right for now, but will start loosing clients soon. Zulip & Discord provide better plans without major feature set downgrade.

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/

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by poutrathor on Monday August 29, 2022 @12:01PM (#32639802)

Zulip and Discord will charge more once their growth plateau, as every one else.

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by madeofpalk on Saturday August 27, 2022 @01:09PM (#32621008)

What's the cost of pissing free-tier people off? None of this has really impacted paying customers, right?

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by bombcar on Saturday August 27, 2022 @04:49PM (#32623040)

Some percentage of free tier people are also paying on other accounts, and some will be lost.

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

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by leaflets2 on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:24PM (#32624251)

I'd think that's not the main problem -- it's instead fewer new users? Impacting future paying customers

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Re:Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus by mooselaker on Saturday August 27, 2022 @05:21PM (#32623337)

Opportunity cost to an extent: instead of convincing them into becoming paying customers, and having them word-of-mouth promote you, they slip away to a competing service, which they may also indeed decide to pay for.

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