
Grove is here to stay - jacobian
https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay
======
aggronn
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am.

$10/month for 5 users on IRC?

This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up,
free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server
setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their
platform is just _built on_ IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow
integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising
heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of
the service.

I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge
someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-
oriented integrated messaging platform or something.

~~~
simonw
"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo"

If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of
maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL.

Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot
of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.

~~~
problemdomain
It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how
familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And
once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it
for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you
get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month.

I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private
IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's
position seems abnormally tenuous.

Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest
plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact
same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly
incentivizes _not_ upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.

~~~
amatix
30-60 minutes to set up not only an irc server, but a persistent web client,
archiving, and full-text search over channels and private chats? The value for
me is seeing what happened after I'd left work yesterday, or finding a
discussion/links that were posted a few days ago.

~~~
problemdomain
You've just done a better job of marketing grove in two sentences than grove
has ever done itself. That's really the point. As it stands, grove.io markets
itself as $10/month for 5 users to chat.

The first two words anyone is going to read on grove.io: "Hosted IRC".

Right about there, 80% of people are going to ask "What's IRC?". It's never
explained.

"and so much more." Like what?

"plus additional features"... uh...?

"Why Grove is better". Better than what?

Oh look, a feature. Almost, if not completely on some screens, below the fold.
"Archives and search"... of what?

Finally, "chat logs". Oh, it's something to do with chat. Well, I already have
that!

If anyone even bothers to look at pricing, they're going to wonder why they
want to pay somebody for all this.

Meanwhile, at least half the people who already know what IRC is are
unimpressed. "IRC? Who uses that anymore? We have IM now. It's free. I even
have logs.". Oops. Same problem.

Edit: Meanwhile, an experienced IRC user like me: I run irssi in screen on a
reliable server. All my channels and private messages are logged, and I know
how to use grep. What's grove for again?

------
seryl
"Grove is here to stay"... _clicks link_

> curl -i <https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay> HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server
> Error Server: nginx/1.1.17 Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT Content-Type:
> text/html Content-Length: 193 Connection: close

<html> <head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head> <body
bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center> </body> </html>

Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!

------
thedjpetersen
Congratulations to the Grove.io team! Its great that this product is able to
keep going.

I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is
fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different
open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their
own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called
Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted
a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large
project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written
in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your
connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative
to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing.

[0] <http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/>

[1] <https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway>

[2] <https://github.com/leedo/alice>

[3] <https://irccloud.com/>

~~~
stephen_mcd
Here's my own one I recently built: <https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty>

Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views
around it.

Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled
webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket.

On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.

------
zalzane
Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster.

5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user) 10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user) 20 users for
50$/mo (2.5$/user) 50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user)

I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to
pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only
corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to
tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a
service.

~~~
igorhvr
Nonsense - their service is _extremely_ cheap.

For the record, I paid their top tier price (actually more than that - they
created a custom plan just for us because we had over 50 users) happily for
several months (and would have paid 2x more).

First, they have this nice web UI, which means hardcore geeks in the company
could use their IRC clients while other people just using the channels
ocasionally to get support (not all of them technical staff) can use the web
version instead.

If that saved one hour of my infrastructure staff overall (and I am sure it
saved quite a bit more than that) it was worth it - hiring first class
infrastructure staff is very challenging, so their time is worth gold.

OTOH, sadly the service was unstable/crashed a lot and eventually we gave up
and migrated to xmpp.

I actually wish they had charged more, because maybe with that they could have
fixed those issues more quickly and I could have avoided another painful
migration...

~~~
jacobian
Indeed, as Grove users the stability issues annoyed the heck out of us, too;
fixing them is our first priority. As in, I'm already working on it!

I know migrating (again!) is a pain, but if you ever want to give Grove
another try, please get in touch (jacob at jacobian.org) and let me know what
we'd need to do to get you back.

------
ryanwaggoner
In this thread: software developers who make $1xx / hr complain about paying a
monthly fee that's worth less than the time it took to write the comments in
question.

Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.

------
dchuk
When I clicked this, I assumed it was going to be Grove going back on their
statement that they were closing down, and I was concerned. That sort of
wavering doesn't bode well for customer trust. In a weird way, I'm glad
someone else is in charge not because the Grove team was bad, but from a PR
perspective this just looks good.

------
jslatts
Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (<https://www.flowdock.com>). Turns out
its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I
would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC
client compatible!

------
mutru
And <https://www.flowdock.com/> is still going to be around, with way better
reliability, IRC support, more and better integrations & much more. :)

A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday:
[http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-
acc...](http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-account-into-
flowdock/)

~~~
martindale
This is awesome, but appears to be broken right now.

~~~
mutru
If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing
team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm
curious what seemed to be broken.

------
endlessvoid94
It's unbelievable how many haters there are. Unbelievable.

------
patrickaljord
Cache
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgrove.io%2Fblog%2Fgrove-
here-stay)

------
frankwiles
Yeah apparently the blog wasn't up to HN level traffic! I'll get that sorted
out asap!

------
hogu
We already moved to flowdock, it seems better so far, primarily because it's
STABLE! When I used grove, the web client was basically unuseable, and even
our IRC clients got disconnected periodically. The worse part is, the IRC
disconnect was often times silent - as in, you would think that you were
signed in, but none of your messages were sent, or you wouldn't actually
receive messages. Presence in IRC (the users that it showed as being in the
room) would become out of date quickly, and I frequently reconnected just to
get an updated list of who was available.

Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't
understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to
implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?

------
Karunamon
I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead
simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty
frontend to IRC?

 _Why does this exist?_

~~~
Karunamon
To the one reply to this: You've been hellbanned - sorry guy. I see some great
stuff in your comment history, apparently some overzealous idiot of a mod
didn't like that you posted that article on controlling a forum.

------
apiengine
I love Grove.io, works for geeks and regular users and easy webhooks. My
channel has everything I want and I've never spent longer than a few minutes
configuring things.

------
kevinprince
This really should be sold as a chat for your business which just happens to
use IRC underneath.

------
dustywusty
Interestingly, their email lacked an unsubscribe link.

~~~
frankwiles
That's a big oversight, email me frank@revsys.com and I'll make sure you don't
receive anymore email. I hate that shit, our bad.

------
arunagarwal
checkout this new upcoming thingy.. <https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta>

------
dualogy
Grove St. OGs fo'life, homies, fo'life!

------
hnuser100
500 Internal Server Error

nginx/1.1.17

