Comment by zeras
14 hours ago
Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor.
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).
That is a really sharp observation. In a traditional SaaS architecture built on standard, expensive managed services (like RDS or Elasticsearch), you'd be 100% right—a free tier this generous would be a financial liability.
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.