I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack
The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale
How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?
How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?
How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?
What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?
Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?
I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
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.
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 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.
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.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
As an ex-Salesforce team, we are well aware of the legacy architecture constraints that Slack operates under and how that drives up their infrastructure costs per user.
We spent months building a custom sync and storage engine from the ground up specifically to avoid that legacy tax. Our pricing isn't a 'deep discount' strategy to mask lower quality; it reflects the fact that our structural cost to store and search text is orders of magnitude lower than the incumbents.
We aren't trying to build a 'cheaper Slack clone' with all the same bells and whistles, we are building a focused, high-performance tool for teams that just want the core communication experience to work perfectly, without paying for the decade of technical debt.
I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams.
Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord.
Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing.
Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need.
The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).
But that’s exactly why we spent months building our core infrastructure from the ground up rather than just assembling off-the-shelf open source or paid components. We made the deliberate architectural choice to develop and optimize our storage and sync engine to drive the marginal cost of a free workspace down to near-zero.
Because our cost basis is structurally lower than competitors carrying legacy tech debt or generic cloud overhead, we can afford to treat the free tier as a sustainable on-ramp rather than a loss leader that bleeds us dry.
Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.
I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps.
Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions.
If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P
> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.
...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.
Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.
You mentioned scale: Cloudflare's free tier covers the first 100k requests/day, but the paid tier is where the economics really shine at scale. We pay roughly $0.30 per million requests
In the traditional architecture (Slack/Teams), you pay for provisioned capacity to handle peak load. That means you are paying for massive EC2 clusters and RDS instances 24/7, even when usage dips at night. You pay for the idle time.
With Cloudflare Workers, we pay strictly for execution time. Chat is incredibly bursty and text data is small. If no one is typing, our infrastructure cost is literally $0. We don't pay for idle CPU.
Even at scale, the cost of executing a Worker for a few milliseconds to route a JSON packet is significantly lower than the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of maintaining a global fleet of VMs, load balancers, and a DevOps team to manage Kubernetes. We trade 'raw metal' efficiency for 'operational' efficiency, which is where the real savings are
It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second.
Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure.
It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers.
Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it.
I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
But the per-request cost is not the only one. You're also paying $0.02 per million CPU-microseconds. If you do the math, that's easily double or triple the equivalent hourly charge for VM instances from the various major cloud providers.
For now, you're benefiting from the zero idle charges and Cloudflare's generous free allowance, because you're at a small scale. As you get bigger, the effect of those factors -- as a fraction of your total spending -- will decrease by a lot, and you'll still be paying the inflated unit costs.
The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search.
I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.
stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?
We are building for the teams that just want to sign up and start working immediately, without choosing a homeserver, verifying keys across devices, or dealing with the UI quirks of federated clients.
Our bet is that a vertically integrated, highly polished UX ("It just works") is the differentiator. We want to be the choice for teams that want the experience of Slack without the bloat, rather than just the protocol of chat.
For example, a 10-person marketing agency in France just needs to collaborate on campaigns today, they shouldn't have to understand the Matrix protocol or manage server infrastructure to get started.That's simply not their core business.
i use slack with one other person. we've been using it for 10 years. we pay every once in a while and download our archives. but i haven't found anything that's as useful, media-friendly, preview-friendly, and thread friendly as slack. we keep looking, but we always stay on slack.
I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.
(Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)