I can understand the perspective, but if you have 35 (or even 31) people at your company, $500 a month is not a significant expenditure compared to salaries.

To bad 99% of managers never think that way. Usually it is salaries are a fixed amount in our budget this extra money needs to go through the process of being approved = Make people work longer to save the hassle. No one accounts for the most expensive cost which is salaries.

If you have a product (any product) in daily use by 30 staff, then switching costs (productivity hit) likely become the dominant factor in making a decision. I would be shocked that $500/mth comes into the picture when the salary expense has gotta be north of $100,000 a month for 30 staff.

Salary and benefits are an HR cost. As Project manager I don't care about that.

IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.

I think you just gave a perfect description of how bureaucratic details produce microoptimizations that, while beneficial to the individual decision-maker, are not optimal for the organization.

I'll refer you back to the "Shadow IT" that was mentioned in the article, while the company I work out has the money to spend on something like this it would never go anywhere since we are a "startup" (Stretching the definition a little) and any cost over $0 is heavily scrutinized (for better or worse). We still use jabber because "It's Free" and now that we have 70-odd employees switching to Slack/HipChat seems like a huge expense. I will readily admit that the issue here isn't as much the cost as much as the people making the decisions thinking that ChatProgramA == ChatProgramB except for ChatProgramA.cost < ChatProgramB.cost where ChatProgramA.cost == $0.

I suggest Sococo (I work there). Free. Includes chat, webcam/audio spaces, doc sharing. Best for distributed teams, especially if practicing Agile.

Thanks! I think we may have just pushed through at least a trial run of HipChat but I'll pass it along and check it out myself.

It depends. If you have no current process, $500/mo for this revolutionary extension to your workflow is great.

If you have a current process, an incremental improvement to it might be a hard sell at $500/mo. And I can guarantee that at 1k users, the $15k/mo is going to be a far harder sell than 'use sharepoint/the public file share/e-mail, it works fine'.

At 1000 users you can likely get a good licensing deal to bring that down a bit.

I agree and this debate has ended along time ago.

Dropbox already proved this point.

If you have hard budget caps and more than 30 employees, it means you're still not going to pay for it this year. This announcement just seems like bad timing. Or maybe they're gearing up for next year.

I suppose that depends on whether the customer thinks they're getting $500/mo of value out of the product :) If they don't, I certainly wouldn't fault them for not buying the product.

It's different when you're adding another person and it's adding an additional 15$/month, and adding an additional 500$/month - even if overall it ends up being the same per person overall for both.

Think of it this way.

If you've got 30 people, you're using this product. Then you add another person.

Now all of a sudden you've got 500$/month expenditures suddenly appearing. The sudden appearance is much more likely to push people to alternative routes than a gradual increase.

That's madness. What's the payroll for 30 people? $500/month isn't going to put a dent in that.

It's not much, compared to other expenses, yes. But that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying that someone is much more likely to look around for alternatives to do something if an expanse suddenly pops up than if an expense gradually does.

Seems like a good point. What it should be is an increased gradient for the next 30 customers, i.e. after 30, each additional is $30 a month, and then after 60, each additional is back to $15. This would get rid of the cliff at 30, but still give you guys the same revenue at 60.

On the other hand, that's exactly what Dropbox for business would cost you, but you don't get the luxury of trying it for free. Also, if a startup is >30 people, they probably have enough $ to afford to pay. 30 people is very, very liberal.

I think it is more of to do with the extra features, you get with the Business plan - https://www.aerofs.com/pricing/

I said a similar thing in another comment thread, I agree it's WAY too big of a jump. Especially since a lot of newer companies are already using Google Apps (so they get storage included, unlimited if they have 5+ users) because it let's them scale up and have fixed costs... 3x that cost/mo for dropbox/gdrive on YOUR OWN hardware? $15/u/mo AFTER 30 seems reasonable but going from $0 (30 users) -> $465 (31 users) is odd....

There are also way cheaper options out there for the same features. Like Emit Cloud http://www.emitcloud.com/home

When I tested Emit Cloud at work the other week, the OS X client seg. faulted.

That's strange. Did it segfault on startup or while running? Was it connected to a server at the time?

On startup. It was not connected to a server. I'd be happy to test it again if there's anything I can do to get more useful info to you - it did seem very promising.

You can contact us here: http://www.biokoda.com/home#contact and we can sort this out over email.

What version of osx do you have?