[snazz]

Knowing how famously inefficient the Slack application is with end user resources, I wouldn’t be surprised if their backend has been poorly optimized.

I serve more than 1000 users on a $3.50/mo VPS with a not-particularly-efficient runtime just fine.

[scrollaway]

Cool, 10000 more of those boxes and you can rebuild slack "in a weekend for $35k/month".

Don't mind the lawsuits when you lose your customer data and forgot to pay for backups for "cost optimization" reasons.

Don't mind the complaints when your uptime is barely one-nine.

Don't mind the customer cancellations when your 1000-user VPS doesn't actually scale to 20k concurrents.

And don't mind the HN snark when you release your slack competitor without voice/video chat support, webhooks, apps, zero debugging capabilities when things go wrong, etc, etc.

I don't even like Slack and I think their bill is too high but please don't be delusional, it's a tired HN trope.

[linuxftw]

I think you're being overly negative. I think you can do a lot with a little.

Does a chat app need to be fully searchable? I don't think so. Does it need backups? I don't think so. These are features users could opt-in for if it was that important to them. Could be something simple as sending encrypted nightly diffs to an email address.

The whole world doesn't need to be over engineered to have a useful product.

[IanCal]

> Does a chat app need to be fully searchable? I don't think so. Does it need backups? I don't think so. These are features users could opt-in for if it was that important to them.

They do, that's why people pay for it.

[zimpenfish]

> Does a chat app need to be fully searchable? I don't think so.

Having had a meeting this afternoon where the critical information required for me to pick up a project was only available in Slack messages, yeah, I think it does.

(Personally I would be roasting the two people involved for not doing that discussion over email or at least not writing the damn things down afterwards but hey ho, I'm not in charge.)

[fragmede]

It's not an unfair point, given how big MVP culture is here.

Unfortunately, "sending encrypted nightly diffs to an email address" comes off very much the same way as the infamous dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Having a search feature, and doing useful backups isn't over engineering, they're features that users are opt-ing in to paying for, to the tune of $400 million/yr.

[sincerely]

>Does a chat app need to be fully searchable?

This is the main reason people pay for Slack instead of sticking with the free tier, so I'm guessing that for a lot of people, it does.

[johncolanduoni]

> Does it need backups? I don't think so.

When all the communications of you and your coworkers suddenly aren't there the next morning, you might think so.

[acchow]

> Does a chat app need to be fully searchable?

Absolutely, yes. There is a ton of tribal knowledge contained in chat history.

[snypox]

Scaling and cost is not linear, my friend.