[bachmeier]

So if you have 15 users, pay $100/month? I suppose a senior engineer for Facebook wouldn't have a problem that. More seriously though

> what is your time worth?

What time are you talking about? If you're doing basic chat stuff on Zulip, and the free plan works, what exactly are you going to "maintain" that's worse than paying $1200 a year until you die - or until Slack decides decides they need revenue growth, so they bump up prices to $2000 a year.

[MexicanJoe]

I don't know of any other industry, where (I assume everyone here is connected to IT) IT people have such a hard time paying other IT people. Slack has to pay salary, servers, networks, devops, health insurance, rent, etc etc. And people just expect them to be able to send out a free service to everyone, and yet they are even keeping their free tier. They are just changing it a little.

The same would be true for Zulip. I assume their developers need to pay rent and provide for their families. But it's open source, you might argue. Okay, if you have contributed to the project you get 20 free accounts for life. The rest of us can pay a small fee every month, so their developers can pay rent and actually focus on making a better product for us.

[MexicanJoe]

If you are a company, then you have to move everyone over and they have to learn the new software, and Karen from accounting and others needs a lot of help switching and what the app on her phone. "The old one was much nicer", "I don't know Markdown". Now Karen hates the new system.

If you self-host then you have to pay for a server. That server needs updates and backups so that is even more time. A server on AWS can just disappear overnight, so you need to prepare for that.

And yet people still go to Starbucks and buy expensive coffee without thinking.