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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 4 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.934s | source
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wpm ◴[18 Sep 25 02:03 UTC] No.45284156[source]▶
I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.

It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.

Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.

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1. ainiriand ◴[18 Sep 25 05:04 UTC] No.45285638[source]▶
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
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2. baq ◴[18 Sep 25 06:07 UTC] No.45286043[source]▶
Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.

I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.

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3. micw ◴[18 Sep 25 07:29 UTC] No.45286638[source]▶
I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
4. pessimizer ◴[18 Sep 25 12:29 UTC] No.45288792[source]▶
Most of this stuff runs on autopilot once it's set up, which is why these companies have such huge margins.

That rounding error in accounting is also a monthly charge, and it sometimes happens that you get a spontaneous demand for $50K in a week and $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the world, and a sysadmin to manage it.