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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1502 points JustSkyfall | 3 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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lordnacho ◴[18 Sep 25 07:24 UTC] No.45286601[source]▶
What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.

I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.

If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.

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1. elAhmo ◴[18 Sep 25 07:38 UTC] No.45286720[source]▶
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
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2. mixcocam ◴[18 Sep 25 07:43 UTC] No.45286757[source]▶
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email. I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.

Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).

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3. elAhmo ◴[18 Sep 25 09:52 UTC] No.45287676[source]▶
They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.

I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).

Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.

Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the last decade uses it or its equivalent.

It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would exist in this form without Slack-like tools.