| ▲ | 9dev 11 hours ago |
| That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision. |
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| ▲ | dahcryn 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 6k would be a no-brainer. In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month. At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is. |
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| ▲ | bluegatty 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a very upside down way to think about it. The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?" The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well. Not 'But it costs $X million!'. Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day? Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy. The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced: "Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?" "That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered." "You know... good point. 64GB it is, then." And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them. | | |
| ▲ | mulmen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Careful, at some companies that kind of talk leads to discontinuing catered lunch. | | |
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| ▲ | mulmen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Monitors are a personal choice. My monitor doesn’t force anyone else to install yet another a chat app to talk to me. The choice of chat app has to be made centrally, or at least at an organizational level. |
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| ▲ | 9dev 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales. | | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales. I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed. | | |
| ▲ | matsemann 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers. | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive realm, where most of the startups you hear about are working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6 months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge amounts of money overall. Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous fields. I know a few companies making agricultural products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-tech news sites. | | | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Quicker and bigger is better than slower and smaller. Especially in a competitive sector. Better to go bust quick, than to eke out a tiny profit by being super frugal. The latter is a waste of everybody's time. |
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| ▲ | jasonkester 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC. You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable. |
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| ▲ | pixelpoet 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 6k would be a no-brainer. "It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?" | |
| ▲ | bonoboTP 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company. | | |
| ▲ | kakacik 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold. | | |
| ▲ | dpark 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16 million dollars? Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts. |
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| ▲ | hnthrow0287345 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs' |
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| ▲ | 9dev 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead. | | |
| ▲ | craftkiller 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week. (I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.) |
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| ▲ | iso1631 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now. |
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| ▲ | 9dev 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing | | |
| ▲ | iso1631 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system. |
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| ▲ | mulmen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You get teams for free with office but how do you justify that logic when free office suites are available? You can’t justify your decision on functionality because that could also be used to justify the cost of Slack. If you’re actually considering cost vs functionality then it’s no longer a no-brainer. |
