[newscracker]

SpiderOak describes this as "Collaboration and messaging for teams." It seems like it's for (for-profit) business teams and not for personal "teams" or groups or non-profits/social groups. I guess the pricing model mentioned in the article is to get businesses that use Slack or Hipchat or other system.

I don't like SpiderOak's pricing models in general because of how it seems to oversell and upsell services. For personal teams/groups, there are free services like Telegram (awesome user experience that keeps improving at a fast pace but poorer homegrown crypto with normal messages stored in plaintext on the servers) and Signal (great crypto but awful user experience, slow and buggy app and slow and unreliable message delivery).

[rarrrrrr]

Thanks for taking a look and for your feedback! Do you have any recommendations for us for alternative pricing?

One of the things we tried to accommodate is that teams can be paid for by the individual members instead of one entity having to foot the whole bill. This was one of the common complaints we saw about Slack, where large communities enjoy using it but had no way to pay for better service.

You can use Semaphor for free just like Slack, with limited historical content retention.

Also, for what it's worth, I use Signal daily for personal messaging, and my own experience with it has been great. We think of Semaphor and the team/business context as as having pretty different requirements (and therefore somewhat different underlying crypto structures) than individual messaging. The biggest differences are about message retention and what happens when you want to invite a new member to an established conversation.

[newscracker]

Sorry, when I wrote my comment, I could not find any information from your website about the pricing of Semaphor and what the tiers provide (it just says "plans starting from $6"). The article didn't really explain the plans and what they provide either.

It seems like the personal plan pricing is high, considering that "personal" use as such may not be high volume or high storage in general for such an application. But that's just a thought without any information, and as such, not useful. It may be easier to judge it after knowing what it provides in every tier.

My comment on pricing was based on the pricing model you have for the backup service, which is highly nonlinear with a very high jump between tiers to push people to buy into a larger one. The plans at 30GB and 1TB remind me of Dreamhost and oversold plans (not that it's wrong business wise, but it doesn't seem fair from the customer's point of view).