yadavrh

Great suggestion, definitely would consider it, the roadmap for now is to have a solid core as a PWA, would love to understand your requirement and use case : pls feel free to send an email to [email protected]

You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought. Two big things on the data front: 1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS. 2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.

You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought.

Two big things on the data front: 1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS. 2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.

Thank you! That's high praise. The "decisions" feature came from our own frustration of losing critical agreements in the endless scroll of chat.

We know it's a crowded space with a lot of history (RIP Stride/HipChat), but we're betting that for many teams, the "social" aspect has actually become too noisy. We're trying to swing the pendulum back slightly towards "calm productivity" without losing the fun of real-time chat.

Thanks! You're 100% right—the ecosystem is the hardest part to replicate. We know we can't match 2,000+ integrations on day one. Our strategy is to nail the core "chat + search" experience first,and then offer a dead-simple, developer-friendly API (think "webhooks on steroids") so teams can easily pipe in the 3-4 critical tools they actually depend on (GitHub, Jira, Alerts), rather than waiting for us to build a massive library.

We use a custom in-house sync engine (similar to how Git works) to propagate messages between peers, but the "source of truth" is local first and a sync server.

This gives you full ownership of your data, instant search (even offline), and naturally supports the kind of privacy/custody requirements you're describing.

You're exactly right. We aren't trying to replace the massive "Slack as an OS" setups that Enterprise Grid customers have built.

We are targeting teams (5-50 people) that need robust, persistent chat but are hitting that "pay-wall or lose-history" cliff with Slack. The goal is to give those teams a professional-grade experience (unlimited search, speed, reliability) without the enterprise tax or complexity

Gmail has been free forever :) even when google wasn't the behemoth it is now

I appreciate the skepticism—usually 'Managed Platform' does imply a heavy markup over raw compute. But for a chat application specifically, the math leans heavily in favor of Cloudflare Workers (Isolates) over traditional VMs/Containers.

You mentioned scale: Cloudflare's free tier covers the first 100k requests/day, but the paid tier is where the economics really shine at scale. We pay roughly $0.30 per million requests

In the traditional architecture (Slack/Teams), you pay for provisioned capacity to handle peak load. That means you are paying for massive EC2 clusters and RDS instances 24/7, even when usage dips at night. You pay for the idle time.

With Cloudflare Workers, we pay strictly for execution time. Chat is incredibly bursty and text data is small. If no one is typing, our infrastructure cost is literally $0. We don't pay for idle CPU.

Even at scale, the cost of executing a Worker for a few milliseconds to route a JSON packet is significantly lower than the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of maintaining a global fleet of VMs, load balancers, and a DevOps team to manage Kubernetes. We trade 'raw metal' efficiency for 'operational' efficiency, which is where the real savings are

That’s a fair critique if the goal was 1:1 feature parity with Slack (2,400+ integrations, workflows, huddles, etc). If that is the definition of maturity, we will indeed never catch up—and that is by design.

As an ex-Salesforce team, we are well aware of the legacy architecture constraints that Slack operates under and how that drives up their infrastructure costs per user.

We spent months building a custom sync and storage engine from the ground up specifically to avoid that legacy tax. Our pricing isn't a 'deep discount' strategy to mask lower quality; it reflects the fact that our structural cost to store and search text is orders of magnitude lower than the incumbents.

We aren't trying to build a 'cheaper Slack clone' with all the same bells and whistles, we are building a focused, high-performance tool for teams that just want the core communication experience to work perfectly, without paying for the decade of technical debt.

That is a really sharp observation. In a traditional SaaS architecture built on standard, expensive managed services (like RDS or Elasticsearch), you'd be 100% right—a free tier this generous would be a financial liability.

But that’s exactly why we spent months building our core infrastructure from the ground up rather than just assembling off-the-shelf open source or paid components. We made the deliberate architectural choice to develop and optimize our storage and sync engine to drive the marginal cost of a free workspace down to near-zero.

Because our cost basis is structurally lower than competitors carrying legacy tech debt or generic cloud overhead, we can afford to treat the free tier as a sustainable on-ramp rather than a loss leader that bleeds us dry.

Matrix is technically impressive, but the friction for non-technical teams is still too high.

We are building for the teams that just want to sign up and start working immediately, without choosing a homeserver, verifying keys across devices, or dealing with the UI quirks of federated clients.

Our bet is that a vertically integrated, highly polished UX ("It just works") is the differentiator. We want to be the choice for teams that want the experience of Slack without the bloat, rather than just the protocol of chat.

For example, a 10-person marketing agency in France just needs to collaborate on campaigns today, they shouldn't have to understand the Matrix protocol or manage server infrastructure to get started.That's simply not their core business.

We take security very seriously (encryption in transit + at rest, SOC 2 based infra and GDPR compliance). We considered default E2EE, but currently, it introduces significant friction for features like instant server-side search (our core value prop vs Slack's hidden history) and simple multi-device onboarding without key management headaches. We are exploring E2EE for specific "Secure Channels" as a future feature, but for the general workspace, we prioritize a seamless "it just works" experience with standard high-security industry practices.

Great point. We’re launching with a clear Fair Usage Policy to address exactly that—preventing abuse (like the "filesystem" hack) while keeping it truly unlimited for actual team communication. Our cost structure is different than legacy players; because we’re built on Cloudflare + our custom CRDT-hybrid store, the overhead for storing and searching text is low enough that we can avoid those arbitrary 90-day or 2-year cutoffs without it being a sustainability risk. We’ll be publishing our explicit "human use" guidelines on the site soon so there’s no "shadow" cap anxiety for legitimate teams.

Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team. $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do. External Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest Access" so you can invite external partners to specific channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill like it does on Slack. Apps: We are launching as a high-performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.

That's a fair point! While we default to unlimited history (since the 90-day hard limit is a pain for most), we plan to let admins set custom retention policies. If you want messages to auto-delete after 90 days to keep things ephemeral, you'll be able to configure that. We don't want to force 'chat as docs' on teams who prefer it temporary.

Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare.

Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.

Hey HN, I built Pylot after getting quoted $800/mo from Coresignal for job data. Our Pro tier is $25/mo for 30k requests. It's a REST API with 10M+ job postings across 50 countries, sub-100ms response times. Free tier available, no credit card required. Happy to answer questions about the data, architecture, or pricing.