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Comment by nadams | Hacker News Reader

> Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free?

There are several service I can think of that have a large user base and support for free (github comes to mind). However, I have to play devil's advocate and say that even some paid services have horrible (or non-existent) support and service.

> How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this?

Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes.

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> Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes.

Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?

It's 100% clear what Slack is doing. From their homepage, they're building "a platform for team communication."

Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?

Startups are about focus. Chasing non-paying non-customers is not a part of that model.

Also, the difference with GitHub is pretty clear. GitHub is the tool for social coding. They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.

> Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?

Marketing? That's another stamp they can put on their list of users. Now look at what happened - instead of making slack look good now this blog post will show up showing how unprofessional they are.

> Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?

If they can't handle an arbitrary number of users - then they shouldn't be advertising it. They are the ones offering as a free service and advertising it as "unlimited".

Don't get me wrong - unlimited is a ridiculous claim (I would never ever claim any service I offer is (publicly anyways) unlimited - and if we had a marketing department that made that claim they would all be fired) but for the majority of their users they probably only account for less than 1% of usage. It's the same game with shared hosting - 1000s of people on the same server but 99.9% of people only use 1% of resources.

> They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.

Their marketing is contradicting - they say "small teams" then they say

"There's also no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack."

and

"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."

So...which is it? (rhetorical question because any sane person signing up would assume unlimited number of users as it says right there in one sentence with no exceptions or asterisks).

The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams". I interpret the more detailed description in that context: no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me: Slack is for teams, so they figured the number is well above any real-life use and probably applies to paid accounts as well.

> The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams".

Actually when you go to slack.com the first thing you see is:

"Slack is a platform for team communication:..."

and

"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."

With 2 textboxes for me to sign up for the service. Nothing to suggest that slack is for "small teams" only.

> The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me:

I don't think you'll get any argument from me - there are only a finite number of CPU cycles, RAM, bandwidth, and hard drive space. But - they should have designed to be a scalable service where all they have to do is spin up some VMs or dedicated systems to increase captivity. Yes - this costs money, but when you offer a free unlimited service - I feel like that's the cost of doing business.

> no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

They need to clearly define what small team means in their terms of service. The carriers were slapped for the "unlimited is not really unlimited"

This is what I found in their TOS:

"The total number of users is limited to the maximum number permitted for your account."

Which is what exactly? What is the limit for free vs paid?

Even if ads could cover the costs+, they might not want to have a lot of people to get the mindset of Slack==Ads. For many of those users, the ad-laden version of Slack might be their first impression of Slack.

you're almost certainly wrong about the advertising, viz stackoverflow's issues monetizing that way

forum/chat advertising is just not particularly valuable

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