Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jillesvangurp 1462 days ago
We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for.

Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation.

You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
2 comments
mekster 1462 days ago
> Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly.

Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?)

Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.

link
jillesvangurp 1461 days ago
I'm an engineer and CTO and well aware of how a "why don't you just ..." can escalate into a significant side project. The thing is I know how these things work and I've seen them escalate repeatedly. We used to run things like jenkins and gitlab self hosted. And we had to deal with outages, backups, things running out of disk, etc. It was doable but definitely a bit of a time-sink.

If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.

Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.

link
BenLloydPearson 1462 days ago
We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!
link
jillesvangurp 1461 days ago
A link would help for that ...
link
Justine_G 1461 days ago
It's called the Starter plan and here's the feature comparison matrix: https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features. :)
link