> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history.

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

Use Slack? The pitch here is minus that retention limit.

That's a fair point! While we default to unlimited history (since the 90-day hard limit is a pain for most), we plan to let admins set custom retention policies. If you want messages to auto-delete after 90 days to keep things ephemeral, you'll be able to configure that. We don't want to force 'chat as docs' on teams who prefer it temporary.

Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team. $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do. External Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest Access" so you can invite external partners to specific channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill like it does on Slack. Apps: We are launching as a high-performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.

> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.

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.

> 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.

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.

Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations.

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!

matrix, element.. too confusing

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.

Matrix is technically impressive, but the friction for non-technical teams is still too high.

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.

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.

E2ee meaning what? Im assuming for compliance reasons any company needs to be able to access all of their internal chats?

We take security very seriously (encryption in transit + at rest, SOC 2 based infra and GDPR compliance). We considered default E2EE, but currently, it introduces significant friction for features like instant server-side search (our core value prop vs Slack's hidden history) and simple multi-device onboarding without key management headaches. We are exploring E2EE for specific "Secure Channels" as a future feature, but for the general workspace, we prioritize a seamless "it just works" experience with standard high-security industry practices.

e2ee makes it hard to do things like “search” which is important for working with teams. For personal messengers usually search is all on device w an encrypted index, once an org grows beyond 50 people that sort of thing breaks down.

That’s a fair critique if the goal was 1:1 feature parity with Slack (2,400+ integrations, workflows, huddles, etc). If that is the definition of maturity, we will indeed never catch up—and that is by design.

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.

This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto

I appreciate the skepticism—usually 'Managed Platform' does imply a heavy markup over raw compute. But for a chat application specifically, the math leans heavily in favor of Cloudflare Workers (Isolates) over traditional VMs/Containers.

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