[myhrvold]

uChat actually saved Uber a lot of money by the way. Slack is way more expensive and it would not meet the requirements of Uber at the time, i.e. anyone being able to chat with anyone (including the famous global Pool Party room with every single employee in it). Also Slack had an issue with Uber's scale, having messaging alerts for services that would not reliably show up that engineering would use to detect outages.

uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course.

I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred.

It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted.

Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.