I would say they are acutely aware of the sales funnel. They weren’t making any money from those users who were ‘happily using Slack’s free tier for years’ and neither was there any prospect of converting them into paid users in the coming years. Very little point in keeping users (and paying to maintain them) who are going to be perpetually at the top of the funnel.

I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert?

Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidating in a single client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.

> I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert? Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

I’d suggest the answer to that is probably no - an open source community is by its very nature going to want costs and overheads down, and all but the largest non profits and NGOs are going to try to get by by stitching together free tools and services. The one that is paying in your example is the one in Slack’s target who is going to be most likely to pay. Does Slack care about a few open source communities potentially churning? Probably not. Does it care about lowering average Time to Revenue? Absolutely.

This. Companies should be charged, sure; but an upside of Slack is that I can use various tech community’s Slack, the union’s Slack, and the coworking’s Slack in the same app.

None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.

They can all better use Discord, whose model works on a per-user (not per-user-per-community) billing model. So less good at separating money from corporations but better aligned with non-commercial organisations as you don't need to pay $2k/month as none-profit just to keep chat history.

I guarantee you that the people making that call have thought about it and decided it's not worth it anyways.

> Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.

Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone on free slack is on free slack because they aren't willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for their competitors.

Not the OP but I think if free slack becomse unattractive enough people might start to look around. There are enough alternatives (self-hosted like Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or free tiers from other vendors e.g. Zulip, Discord). That presumably has two effects: 1. People are used to them and if the decision at the workplace comes up to choose a solution the other product is on the table. Or worse if Slack messes something up with the paid tier people might be more willing to switch to something else that they know already.

2. Every private group chat might involve people who never used something like it before. For these people the software they use first is the baseline. And they are more likly to recommend the solution they already know to a organistation that is willing/able to pay for a higher tier.

We can't assume someone who won't pay for Slack won't pay for the thing they move to. How many people do you think pay for Discord's paid features that never would have paid for the forums Discord killed? The almost $15 billion dollar valuation suggest a lot.

It's not that simple.

People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to buy slack for work.

The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the employees requesting it.

Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack because of the employees.

But if the new employees will not even know slack exists… they will not be asking for it.

It is not that simple too. Tools used for reasons outside of work may not always be perceived as good tools for work. And tools used professionally are not always considered to be good for use for personal reasons. If someone have met Slack for the first time at their job, they may recommend it at their next job, because they associate it with work - this conversion channel is pretty clear and established. But the conversions work<->personal are not so obvious and may perform worse. I'm pretty sure Slack marketing team controls awareness part of the journey and they understand well their conversion funnel. Ditching some non-converting users is a bold move, but it may be worth it and it may fit well in whatever sales strategy Salesforce has in mind.

it's not that simple either:

tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived as good tools for work;

and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to be good for use for personal reasons.

tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes, which it is

Well, if I wasn't clear enough: the fact that someone have used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases. You need this to be a healthy conversion funnel and valuable brand awareness channel, otherwise you are wasting money. To make a call you need data from marketing research and I would assume that Slack marketing team knows more about it than HN crowd, simply because they are in position to have this data and HN crowd is not. It can be the case that they are not acting professionally, but I would not assume unprofessional behavior by default.

I respect your opinion of,

someone hav[ing] used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo

Salesforce doesn't even care about paying customers. Heroku has stagnated for years. Recent Heroku massive mistakes they've been making have been absolutely terribly handled by them.

They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is pretty badly handled.

They were saving them advertising money.

I think this, combined with Heroku, marks end of an era.

These tools built themselves on being free (as in beer) up to a certain extent, and now they're big enough, and trust their momentum, so they change their stance.

This will inevitably create some changes, both how they perceived and being developed, but we'll see...

However, web application development is much easier and scalable infrastructure is democratized now. Their moat may not be as robust as they imagine.

This will get interesting.

They may not immediately recognize it, but they are “cashing out the social capital”

Very..

Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.

They are doing something similar to Tableau. They have been actively rolling out features only available to subscription based customers - ie if you own perpetual licenses and only paying x% yearly for maintenance you are starting to get less product than their subscription customers. It is nuts and is driving us to actively consider PowerBI which is like Teams is included with the enterprise license.

In Heroku's case, it could be argued the free users were a net-negative liability, causing service outages, DNS issues, etc...

What? Those free users are practically providing free infrastructure testing. Those low-no profit margins are hiding a lot of stuff underneath. Intel and Cloudflare are famous for reaching scale by using cheap/free end of the market to expand and solidify their positions.

Speaking more to the torrent and zombie bot farms, and the abuse of free dynos.

For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.

I fail to see how letting crooks mine cryptos on Heroku’s free boxes would lead to improved sales. Slack is a different story, but all hosting/CI/etc providers have been pulling back free offerings as they get abused for crypto mining

But just think of the promotion opportunities!

Salesforce doesn't care. There about to roll out slack-first infrastructure that turns slack into the only chat-based CRM. Their core users aren't on the free model. They're paying a small fortune for Salesforce and see Slack's cost as a drop in the bucket.