[l33tman]

Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now.

They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs..

We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts.

I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)

[OskarS]

Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.

[SR2Z]

The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen.

The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...

[alabastervlog]

They don’t want records around that expose crimes when discovery happens, and they want that so much that they shave a percent or two off the company’s productivity to get it.

[kevin_thibedeau]

If it's important enough to mention in a document then the person creating the document should preserve a copy of what is clearly ephemeral information. It's just as daft was referencing emails in a document.

[SR2Z]

Yes, but what people should do rarely matches what they actually do and deleting old messages just makes it impossible to recover that info.

I find that this take is much more common among managers and executives who are used to being spoon-fed documentation than among the engineers who actually have to write and hunt for it.

[Denvercoder9]

> The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

That doesn't track with my experience as a user at all. Almost every day I do a search that returns results older than a year.

[crummy]

This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack doesn't really care; those communities were never going to pay any real money anyway.

[high_na_euv]

Slowly? Discord is #1 in gaming and probably dev too

[Macha]

Yeah, I'd say discord taking skype's lunch in the gaming market was something that happened "rapidly" and "in 2016".

EDIT: Oh, this subthread is about slack.

I do think Slack's permissions model is better suited to business use than Discord's.

[bayindirh]

Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?

[el_snark]

You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.

[knowitnone]

you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?

[soundnote]

Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and Slack's just expensive:

Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user

Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo

M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo