Free tiers strikes again

Another day, another round of internet indignation.

I'm a bit late on this announcement, but I couldn't refuse to comment on the parasites indignity of the day. Slack decided that 10.000 messages and 5GB of storage in total were too much and changed the free tier to keep a full 90 fays of chat history instead.

Zulip about the Slack change

Zulip, a Slack competitor, made a good assumption about how this change is going to affect Slack's users and a good marketing move on their part. This means that you must read Zulip's blog post with a huge grain of salt.

As I commented about the Gitlab change previously, probably the readers already know on which side of the fence I am about this kind of controversies.

Poor, poor maintainers

As I said, Zulip did a good work demolishing Slack's lie (because it is) and for sure, the majority of Slack's free tier users are never going to write more than 10.000 messages in 90 days. In the end, this is a move, from Slack, to slash some costs on, probably, users that they will never be able to monetize. As usual, the internet is up in arms because Slack's change will disadvantage some categories.

As for the Gitlab plan, Slack is totally right in changing their free plan however they wish. Slack is a company out there to make money. If they believe that their loss-leader tier is not doing a good job anymore, they absolutely have the right to change it or, better, get rid of it altogether.

Zulip in their blog post identified some user categories most impacted by this change and I must say, I may have simpathy for some of them, but for sure not all. Let's go look at what they say:

> Among the stories we’ve been hearing from users, a few categories of organizations jump out as being hurt the most by Slack’s free tier change. These are groups that are severely impacted by losing their older message history, while lacking easy access to funding to afford a paid plan

> Researchers, educators, and students [...snip...]

> Community groups. [...snip...]

> Open-source projects. [...snip...]

Researchers, educators, and students

Here not much to say. We are talking about normal users, probably the category of users for whom the free tier is the most adapt.

Educators and student shouldn't have problems with the new 90-days retention policy. I don't expect those kind of people to completely rely on Slack's history for everything. Researchers? Those are professionals already and should pay for the tool or, at least, complement it with other solutions to do everything required.

Community group

This is the only group I have real simpathy for. Local communities, hobby groups, no profits and such, should have, in a future, some kind of advantage even for the paid plans. Those are the users that are less technologically experienced and it may make sense to give them a really cheap alternative to the free plan itself, if more history is required.

Open-source projects

Here my rage explodes. Reading something like this by somebody that should know better is asinine. Here, read it all:

> #opensource twitter - how are you reacting to @SlackHQ hiding messages after 90 days? We use #slack daily for communicating with ~70 member #pyam community. This change kills our ability to discuss tips, proposed features, etc. Preferred alternatives?

>

> https://pyam-iamc.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

I'm reacting that you don't have a community. Forcing somebody to make an account to a proprietary product, to interact with your open source project, means that you don't care about free software, or open source for that matter.

In your case, dear "open source community", you are out of luck. An open source project, leaning on a community, shouldn't run it's chat platform on a proprietary product. An open source project should prefer a free and open platform, like IRC on libera.chat, run by volunteers and at zero cost for the users. No, I totally have no simpathy for those false open source programmers forcing people on proprietary products. You got what you deserve and I hope everybody will start to laugh at you (and Kubernetes too).

As I said for Gitlab, Slack is right in doing what it does and I hope they will get rid of their free tier at some point. The people complaining are just parasites. They never evaluated the product for what it is, for it's qualities combined with it's price.

They just want a free ride.

If you really care about the Slack's chat history, those people could have used something like bitlbee, with the slack plugin and the whole history of their chats would have been stored on their pcs. Too bad this does not work like the web client.

Again, pay-up, or shut-up. Slack, get rid of the free plan altogether, I believe you are not losing much anyway. Even if I hate your product, I'm on your side on this. Go ahead and terminate all of those parasitic accounts. It's high time people start to value your hard work.