I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.

My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.

What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.

Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.

I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.

We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.

We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?

I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.

I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.

Notifications need to be solid as well.

Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team. $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do. External Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest Access" so you can invite external partners to specific channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill like it does on Slack. Apps: We are launching as a high-performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.

Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations.

We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.

But good luck!

> Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.

Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.

> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.

We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings.

Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck.

Give me Teams

Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where we can communicate with anyone

Downside is, its total lock-in to microsoft.