And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?
Notably this is a 50% higher price than Disney+
Each subscription takes a toll. The price is set at $0, to make it more expensive is always going to be infinitely more expensive, but $12 is a lot for simple uses, and paying it in perpetuity is undesirable too.
Whatsapp was $1/y when it monetised, and I believe they were profitable, for context.
Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.
"advanced features" is also vague enough to be true no matter what you mean.
Practically speaking "magnetic notepad on a fridge accessible from anywhere" has been solved over and over and over again, and often in better ways.
Slack is a shiny UX on a middling bit of software with a good marketing department.
It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features.
And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.
There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible.
Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.
For example.
'Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era'
How did BBS 'solve' this problem?
The only bad part of it was the fact that nobody had a BBS compatible device in their pocket, but the core functionality of a centralised message board accessible from anywhere in the planet in essentially real-time was definitely at hand.
The major difference is that things these days are quite a bit more usable and we have little devices that are many hundreds of times more powerful than those BBS clients in our pockets.
But there have been so many iterations on the same idea that it's absolutely FALLACIOUS to say that Slack has innovated in anything other than marketing, they are so far from the first and so far from the best that it's sickening that you would defend $12/mo PER USER for a family.
yeah, they're not serious enough, but it's not costing Slack $48/mo to host 4 people, it probably costs $4 (very generously, taking all costs into consideration)
And even if there were such a product, why do you think that the $4/month in 2022 terms wouldn't have been $40/month or more, in 2000?
To me it seems intuitively obvious, much smaller adoption rate, much more niche or wealthy customer base on average, etc., in 2000, which would have made 2000Slack a boutique product.
Other than that it is obvious to me that you’re out of touch with reality entirely. $12 per user per month for a chat tool is a legitimately unjustifiable amount for the majority of the current slack user base.
You can argue that free is freeloading, perhaps I agree, but saying anyone not forking over €12/user is not a serious user is just insanely dismissive to the point of absurdity.
You also completely missed the point: BBSs were a one stop shop for all the features and more that slack has, IRC was the same but lacked persistence, which was bolted on, XMPP also had all the features slack had and is being sold to you as things like google talk and Facebook messenger (which is XMPP underneath!).
Slack innovates in marketing, telling people that they want this stuff. The product is not innovative and for the average/prosumer user the value simply isn’t there.
Zulip is so superior it is actually disgusting; and it’s FOSS.
Not to mention “matrix” or the multitude of fantastic walled garden chat tools.
Slack enjoys a niche because of rugpulling, bringing people in with marketing and UX and the promise that you can work with your existing client and cheaply so don’t worry about it! (IRC/XMPP gateways; generous free tier) before removing them.
That you defend this makes me believe you have a financial incentive.
I'm not really sure where $4 in 2002 came from.
Feels like regressive AWS style pricing. The casual users are overpaying to provide the basis for advanced features only a fraction of users, who have sufficient resources to optimize their efficiency, need.