✨ Finally upgraded https://t.co/VbTTH3ltoQ's Slack to the paid plan after many years
— @levelsio (@levelsio) May 22, 2021
It's VERY expensive at $5,000/mo (or about 1/6th of net revenue) but it'll remove the 10,000 message limit which means no empty channels anymore, even 🇫🇮 #finland now has messages #investment pic.twitter.com/BDSrjaOoMB
I still love Slack as a community building tool, despite the lack of chat history. I'm really curious to see how this paid plan goes for Levels and whether the cost of the paid plan is actually worth it.
He does make logical points for his reasoning:
- the cost is 1/6th of the current revenue — he can afford it
- he has members on Discord and Slack
- it's really not as simple as moving people over to Discord, many people just won't make the move
- it's hard and probably not worth the effort of building his own version, especially when there is huge risk of people not having the habits of using a new tool.
- it's an experiment, he can always cancel it if it doesn't make sense.
For me, these days it's a toss of the coin between Discord and Slack. Both have their pros and cons.
Lack of moderation and chat history are the biggest issues for Slack. However, I feel it wins for being a standard for most 'knowledge workers'.
Discord is cool, but their lack of threading is a huge pain. Though the custom roles, moderation, bots and their voice + Stages is pretty awesome.
Of course, there are plenty of other community tools out there, but one of the biggest challenges for community builders is getting people to show up. And increasingly this means going where your people are.
I still think it's a crazy amount to spend per month, but probably no worse than hiring someone to do custom dev or needing to hire more hands to help manage the community. I also have hope that it may just open up discussions for more affordable community focused Slack plans.
One can live in hope, eh? 🤞
