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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1502 points JustSkyfall | 4 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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realityfactchex ◴[18 Sep 25 02:22 UTC] No.45284350[source]▶
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.

Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].

Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?

Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.

  [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) 
  [1] https://zulip.com
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1. dizhn ◴[18 Sep 25 08:52 UTC] No.45287248[source]▶
Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives exist.
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2. wltr ◴[18 Sep 25 09:01 UTC] No.45287312[source]▶
Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
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3. detaro ◴[18 Sep 25 09:08 UTC] No.45287356[source]▶
The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.

If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.

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4. subscribed ◴[18 Sep 25 10:36 UTC] No.45287980{3}[source]▶
Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me.

¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/