Ask HN: Does your team pay for any Slack apps or integrations?

[7237139812]

Hey HN! I am asking out of genuine curiosity, and perhaps doing a little market research.

My team uses https://www.donut.com/ and https://officevibe.com/ but I'm pretty sure we're on the free tier for both.

Do you work in a team that pays monthly for any cool Slack apps or integrations? Which ones? If you're not the one paying, do you find it useful - or annoying?

Cheers!

[bberenberg]

My guess is that if you could pay for Slack Apps as part of a Slack bill, then the vendors would make a lot more money. Otherwise you get stuck in procurement hell.

[quickthrower2 → bberenberg]

Yeah it is not that we cannot afford $50 a month for a slack tool, it is that if I am going to use mental and communication bandwidth to ask for something it’ll be something more impactful usually. The exception would be must have things that might also integrate with slack such as annual leave management etc.

If slack apps were like cloud resources and teams could “spin up” what they need it might be different.

[shmoobadge]

Stopped paying for Slack, still use the free version. Had free integrations, don't use any more.

The WTF of Huddles and threads, and the complete lack of working notifications mean we can't trust integrations or complicated features to work or stay working.

[RamblingCTO → shmoobadge]

Absolutely agree. We don't pay for slack as well. This pile of sh*t sucks. How can they not have proper notifications? Slack is not a working mode of communication and I really hope we get something better asap.

[adobrawy]

We (30 ppl startup) use paid Slack, a few paid Slack applications and paid integrations. Dailybot (paid) for stand-up of engineers and sales. Reminds you to write a stand-up, organizes information. After our questions, they prepared integrations with Shortcut. HeyTaco (paid) for team engagement. We are remote. Emotions are harder to convey. Those who help can be burdened and underappreciated. We are remote. Emotions are harder to convey. Those who help can be burdened and underappreciated. A small gesture that someone gave you a taco for what you did for them gives a smile. We also have integration with Slack: * Zapier (paid) - channel topic based on schedule (who is responsible for something in rotation schedule), various notifications from internal system to Slack go via Zapier (to keep a log of them in Spreadsheet too) * Google Script (free) - automatic posting of recordings of team meetings to the appropriate Slack channel

[VincentEvans]

Slack is the only chat app that I’ve used professionally that doesn’t show how many messages are unread in a channel I am subscribed to. The channel name gets bold and that’s it. Am I behind by 1 message? By 50? Who knows! Click to find out!

Now threads - in Google Chat and Teams - it shows the last, or the couple of last messages, if short, of the thread right under the message that started the thread, collapsing the ones in-between. This way I can see if I am caught up on thread replies without having to open it. But not slack.

It’s weird to leave slack for alternatives 5 years ago, just to cross paths again - and realize that all of the annoyances that were there - still are.

[dvno42]

We pay for Slack for the screenshare feature but not for any integrations. I like the simplicity and snapiness of Slack's chat and screen share compared to other modern platforms. No lag, minimal stupid animations, and cross platform compatibility. Easy enough to write integrations against too.

'Threads' feature is annoying and I hate it when people try to use it. Code formatting is nice.

Federation with MS Teams could be nice so I don't have to launch Teams whenever the one off meeting happens but that will never happen.

Shrugs It's good enough.

[the__alchemist]

No. Part of a major US government organization with a massive overall budget, and we use the free version. The funding channels aren't avail to pay for it; different pots of money etc.

[devKnight]

Where i work we use Standuply to run regular surveys and get standups from everyone through their bot.

[ikk_ah]

Sorry for stealing part of the conversation, I released a new app just 2 weeks ago, would love to hear feedback if it solves a problem to anyone.

App is in Slack marketplace review, but is usable and can be integrated. Also app is free for now.

https://slack.com/apps/A04KSRC0606-work

[quickthrower2 → ikk_ah]

Sweet idea. Kind of like a mini Jira within slack I guess.

[eaurouge → ikk_ah]

Two paragraphs, no elevator pitch. Hope your app provides better UX.

[ikk_ah → eaurouge]

thanks for feedback, this is important point I missed

[danwee]

No. I see more and more dependencies against Slack (e.g., platform tools to create Jira issues, or request permissions, etc.) I think it's a dangerous path: Slack will die (sooner rather than later I believe) and suddenly we'll face a bunch of workflows that do not work anymore.

My team is slowly leaving Slack. We are transitioning to Mattermost. So far so good.

[muzani → danwee]

Why do you think Slack will die soon?

[Rastonbury → muzani]

Salesforce bought them and they have a habit of ruining non-CRM acquisitions, Heroku before, Tableau's funeral was recently on frontpage and Slack is next.

[als0 → muzani]

I would suppose their pricing model is not competitive.

[pjerem → als0]

Yes but however, due to all the integrations everywhere, their retention rate must be incredible.

I cannot imagine that any medium company would invest the time and money necessary to quit slack. Especially when you have bots everywhere.

It’s not that it’s undoable but you have to replace it with something reeeeaaaally awesome to justify the pain.

Today Slack is pretty meh, there may be better alternatives considering your use case but nothing so awesome that you would do it.

[happymellon → pjerem]

The bean counters have always pushed back on Slack "because we already pay for teams".

In my experience Teams is winning, but not because anyone wants to use it.

> cannot imagine that any medium company would invest the time and money necessary to quit slack.

You would be surprised at the "cost savings" companies will do to make their most expensive assets waste time.

[bhouston → danwee]

I think Slack is mostly getting squeezed by Microsoft Teams. Mattermost is good, but Teams is killing Slack in most enterprises and it is just going to get worse.

[dattmavis → bhouston]

Yeah I work in sales for EA software and we deal with really large enterprises. I see smaller companies and startups using Slack, but most of the big boys are heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.

[laksmanv]

we use TimeBot for away tracking

[hpen]

Work at large corp and we use teams and slack