I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.
In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.
You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought.
Two big things on the data front: 1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS. 2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.
You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought.
Two big things on the data front:
1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS.
2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.
My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack.
This is a bigger deal than you might think.
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.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
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.
I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs?
I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
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.
> 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.
> 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
I feel the same way when I get an email with a Teams link, but I think we're all just going to have to live with the idea that everyone is on different platforms.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.
Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.
Can I download Teams without it also requiring Microsoft updaters and other stuff that insists on lurking in the background? Having a standalone MS app is fine, but I will never allow their updaters and background processes.
All the cross tenant inconsistency really needs to be ironed out, I'm not sure if it's just my org but half the features of calls are randomly disabled or enabled based on who originated it.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat
I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack
The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale
How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?
How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?
How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?
What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?
Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?
I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000%
Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off
I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it
Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it
> or they increase their pricing by 1000%
1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely
---
> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.
But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
$50k a year? Those are rookie numbers. You're actually fine, as a small fish going belly up isn't the end of the world. You can start a new business. For some big tech companies this is potentially near existential. I would know.
I didn’t read the full site but it seems they’re not really going for those users?
Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.
This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.
You're exactly right. We aren't trying to replace the massive "Slack as an OS" setups that Enterprise Grid customers have built.
We are targeting teams (5-50 people) that need robust, persistent chat but are hitting that "pay-wall or lose-history" cliff with Slack. The goal is to give those teams a professional-grade experience (unlimited search, speed, reliability) without the enterprise tax or complexity
> 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
Great point. We’re launching with a clear Fair Usage Policy to address exactly that—preventing abuse (like the "filesystem" hack) while keeping it truly unlimited for actual team communication. Our cost structure is different than legacy players; because we’re built on Cloudflare + our custom CRDT-hybrid store, the overhead for storing and searching text is low enough that we can avoid those arbitrary 90-day or 2-year cutoffs without it being a sustainability risk. We’ll be publishing our explicit "human use" guidelines on the site soon so there’s no "shadow" cap anxiety for legitimate teams.
Your costs will change and shift over time. Personally, I don't trust anything that says "Free Forever" or "Unlimited". Give a real limit and figure out the transition. "Free now, and no plans to change, but if it does, we will give you one year to transition" is much more confidence building then "Free forever".
I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!
Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":
> Feature circus
> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?
This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.
People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.
I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing.
It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is.
If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
>I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature.
Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't.
>If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue.
All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
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.
I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell.
Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.
Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing).
I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.
I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.
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.
I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere.
If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.)
Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain.
That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request.
You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord?
IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land.
It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere.
I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile.
People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff.
People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison.
People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.
Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…
Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.
We use a custom in-house sync engine (similar to how Git works) to propagate messages between peers, but the "source of truth" is local first and a sync server.
This gives you full ownership of your data, instant search (even offline), and naturally supports the kind of privacy/custody requirements you're describing.
Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates
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.
Thanks! You're 100% right—the ecosystem is the hardest part to replicate.
We know we can't match 2,000+ integrations on day one. Our strategy is to nail the core "chat + search" experience first,and then offer a dead-simple, developer-friendly API (think "webhooks on steroids") so teams can easily pipe in the 3-4 critical tools they actually depend on (GitHub, Jira, Alerts), rather than waiting for us to build a massive library.
This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product).
Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.
Thank you! That's high praise. The "decisions" feature came from our own frustration of losing critical agreements in the endless scroll of chat.
We know it's a crowded space with a lot of history (RIP Stride/HipChat), but we're betting that for many teams, the "social" aspect has actually become too noisy. We're trying to swing the pendulum back slightly towards "calm productivity" without losing the fun of real-time chat.
Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system.
As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different.
If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).
> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.
...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.
Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.
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
I still think you're looking at this from a very small perspective (and to be clear, to begin with that may be the right call, it'll just bite badly at some scale).
It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second.
Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure.
It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers.
Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it.
I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
But the per-request cost is not the only one. You're also paying $0.02 per million CPU-microseconds. If you do the math, that's easily double or triple the equivalent hourly charge for VM instances from the various major cloud providers.
For now, you're benefiting from the zero idle charges and Cloudflare's generous free allowance, because you're at a small scale. As you get bigger, the effect of those factors -- as a fraction of your total spending -- will decrease by a lot, and you'll still be paying the inflated unit costs.
This sounds reasonable (and the 30 microcents per request is pretty cool), but I wonder how do you handle storage and indexing. It still costs you, even when no one is typing.
Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option?
I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.
Not the OP, but I’m assuming they meant end-to-end-encryption.
The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search.
I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, if I had to start from scratch in my own company, I would pick zulip.
That is thread friendly for real, for proper async communication. Slack threads were bolted on as a feature, and it shows. I know that in 2 this is not a problem, but the way that - for example - notifications work for threads when you have 10s (or 100s) of threads is a pain. Finding back threads you were involved with is a huge pain.
Yeah. We've seen many instances where "forever" isn't actually forever--even sometimes with paid lifetime licenses. I'd be much more excited by a self-hosted option.
This is just another step in a race to the bottom for prices. I don't hate it, but it's also nothing amazing. Flagging messages as decisions is cool (and something AI could do for us) but otherwise it's Just Another Slack competitor.
I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.
Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements.
I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.
In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.
You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought. Two big things on the data front: 1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS. 2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.
please don't reply to HN comments with AI responses
This response sounds very much like LLM. "You've hit on a core part of our mission.". lol
This is a copy-paste from some sort of LLM, which doesn't inspire any confidence. Pasted it twice too
I was about to ask the same thing. I saw mentioning of gdpr, feels like at least some europeans are involved.
However: I don’t want to have my data in the US for at least 3 years. For businesses outside the US: they simply cannot have their data in US anymore.
Build european/non-us would be a great argument to use this product.
You've hit on a core part of our mission. We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought.
Two big things on the data front: 1. Local-First: Since the primary storage is on your own devices, you have much more direct control over your data custody than with traditional SaaS. 2. Regional Hosting: We'll be offering a choice of data residency. If you need your data to stay within the EU for compliance or security, you can simply toggle that.
You guys are awesome! I hope you will succeed.
Any way to migrate my data from slack to Dock?
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.
My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
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.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
Notifications need to be solid as well.
I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
Really? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.
Perhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack"
Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.
I agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.
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.
I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs?
Then your iteration stays ~ the same.
I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
Mobile notifications are a must have for any Slack replacement. Lots of teams have centralized their on call alerts to Slack.
Don't this would be a problem. Mobile notifications are good with vapid/pwas nowadays
Please ask ChatGPT that you're clearly using to write these responses to reapond in proper human speech, and format for Hacker News.
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!
replicating the api is a great idea!
> 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.
> 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.
I feel the same way when I get an email with a Teams link, but I think we're all just going to have to live with the idea that everyone is on different platforms.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.
Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.
Zoom just works on the other hand.
If you had just downloaded Teams it would have worked fine.
It isn’t Microsoft’s fault that Safari is a shit browser and the macOS people who keep it as their default won’t switch to something better.
Can I download Teams without it also requiring Microsoft updaters and other stuff that insists on lurking in the background? Having a standalone MS app is fine, but I will never allow their updaters and background processes.
... and that's how browser monopolies are formed.
Your "something better" is certainly Chrome.
But that's irellevant because the likes of teams and google chat are made for management and at best sales, while slack is made for engineers.
All the cross tenant inconsistency really needs to be ironed out, I'm not sure if it's just my org but half the features of calls are randomly disabled or enabled based on who originated it.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat
I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack
The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale
How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?
How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?
How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?
What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?
Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?
I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000%
Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off
I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it
Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it
> or they increase their pricing by 1000%
1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely
---
> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.
But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
> I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
They don't have to shut you off - but they've got every reason to raise the price.
If they can bully you onto a $15/user/month 'Business Plus' plan, your 1000 clients would cost you $180,000 a year.
$50k a year? Those are rookie numbers. You're actually fine, as a small fish going belly up isn't the end of the world. You can start a new business. For some big tech companies this is potentially near existential. I would know.
> I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
Until they get bought by Broadcom and deem you too small to waste time on.
Worse.. Slack is owned by Salesforce
> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Would adopting the OP put you in a different position?
A lot of things people build with slack could be done with email but it is seen as old fashioned.
I didn’t read the full site but it seems they’re not really going for those users?
Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.
This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.
You're exactly right. We aren't trying to replace the massive "Slack as an OS" setups that Enterprise Grid customers have built.
We are targeting teams (5-50 people) that need robust, persistent chat but are hitting that "pay-wall or lose-history" cliff with Slack. The goal is to give those teams a professional-grade experience (unlimited search, speed, reliability) without the enterprise tax or complexity
> 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
Great point. We’re launching with a clear Fair Usage Policy to address exactly that—preventing abuse (like the "filesystem" hack) while keeping it truly unlimited for actual team communication. Our cost structure is different than legacy players; because we’re built on Cloudflare + our custom CRDT-hybrid store, the overhead for storing and searching text is low enough that we can avoid those arbitrary 90-day or 2-year cutoffs without it being a sustainability risk. We’ll be publishing our explicit "human use" guidelines on the site soon so there’s no "shadow" cap anxiety for legitimate teams.
Your costs will change and shift over time. Personally, I don't trust anything that says "Free Forever" or "Unlimited". Give a real limit and figure out the transition. "Free now, and no plans to change, but if it does, we will give you one year to transition" is much more confidence building then "Free forever".
Gmail has been free forever :) even when google wasn't the behemoth it is now
This caught my eye:
> $50 /month
> $300/year if paid annually
I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!
Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":
> Feature circus
> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?
This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.
People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.
I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing.
It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is.
If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
>I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature.
Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't.
>If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue.
All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
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.
I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell.
Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.
why not mattermost which is open source you can selfhost and is really really good.
didn't mattermost recently make some changes to their license that put a bunch of features behind a paywall?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675
Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing).
I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.
I think Campfire used to have a one-time cost of $200 or something per domain, when did it switch to being free?
Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...
I actually just learned that from visiting now, haha. It's surprising.
I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.
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.
I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere.
If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.)
Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain.
That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request.
You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord?
IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land.
It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere.
I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile.
People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff.
People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison.
People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.
Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…
Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.
We use a custom in-house sync engine (similar to how Git works) to propagate messages between peers, but the "source of truth" is local first and a sync server.
This gives you full ownership of your data, instant search (even offline), and naturally supports the kind of privacy/custody requirements you're describing.
As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?
Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates
Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention becomes my documentation and I don't want that.
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.
Use Slack? The pitch here is minus that retention limit.
What would make me and my users move to an alternative comes down to the integrations and the seamless mobile transition.
The chat part, channels, tagging and upload of asset isn't enough, there are already alternatives to slack offering this that are open source.
I love what you're offering, I hope you get there.
Thanks! You're 100% right—the ecosystem is the hardest part to replicate. We know we can't match 2,000+ integrations on day one. Our strategy is to nail the core "chat + search" experience first,and then offer a dead-simple, developer-friendly API (think "webhooks on steroids") so teams can easily pipe in the 3-4 critical tools they actually depend on (GitHub, Jira, Alerts), rather than waiting for us to build a massive library.
This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product).
Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.
Thank you! That's high praise. The "decisions" feature came from our own frustration of losing critical agreements in the endless scroll of chat.
We know it's a crowded space with a lot of history (RIP Stride/HipChat), but we're betting that for many teams, the "social" aspect has actually become too noisy. We're trying to swing the pendulum back slightly towards "calm productivity" without losing the fun of real-time chat.
Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system.
0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...
I'm gonna let you in on a secret... 99% of Mac users don't know what the Dock is called.
Why does every vibe coded site has a grid background? I know because my current 2 projects I inherited has the same background, all vibe coded.
It says no bloat, is that a nod to it being built with something other than Electron?
As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different.
If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).
What I really want is an auth system like Github. Let me create my user account and bring it with me to one or more organizations.
This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.
From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap...
> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.
...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.
Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.
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
I still think you're looking at this from a very small perspective (and to be clear, to begin with that may be the right call, it'll just bite badly at some scale).
It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second.
Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure.
It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers.
Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it.
I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
> We pay roughly $0.30 per million requests
But the per-request cost is not the only one. You're also paying $0.02 per million CPU-microseconds. If you do the math, that's easily double or triple the equivalent hourly charge for VM instances from the various major cloud providers.
For now, you're benefiting from the zero idle charges and Cloudflare's generous free allowance, because you're at a small scale. As you get bigger, the effect of those factors -- as a fraction of your total spending -- will decrease by a lot, and you'll still be paying the inflated unit costs.
This sounds reasonable (and the 30 microcents per request is pretty cool), but I wonder how do you handle storage and indexing. It still costs you, even when no one is typing.
IMHO, instead of 90-day memory loss, use an LRU eviction strategy.
Slack was originally more or less “better irc”. Can we not just make better irc?
kudos for posting a Show HN.
not doubting it's useful but it feels very vibecoded
> Async messages for deep work. Real-time chat when it matters. Work across timezones without the noise.
What does that even mean?
I encourage you to rewrite the copy and drop the emoji.
your CTA at the top is "join waitlist_" with that funky underscore cursor but there's a free version I can "get started free" now? doesn't add up
also I think the winner approach here open core like twenty.com. let people build on it, but charge for hosting it
just my $0.02. good luck!
Wow, they have a wait list. Are they also 50% off for a limited time?
Any more FOMO bits on their page?
Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option?
I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.
This is why the next generation needs to be built on an open protocol like ATProto
it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...
E2ee meaning what? Im assuming for compliance reasons any company needs to be able to access all of their internal chats?
Not the OP, but I’m assuming they meant end-to-end-encryption.
The company (customer) would be able to see their chats, but the provider (Dock) would not. I don’t think you’d need to have the encryption on a per-user level, but you could. The main point being that the customer’s chats would only be visible to them, not Dock. It would make some features more difficult though, namely search.
I’m not sure it’s entirely required, but I’d expect it as an option in the non-free tiers.
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.
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.
yawn, if i can't self host then you've already locked my data in.
hard passsssss
I know it’s probably your MVP website and I may be in the minority here but..
I guess I have vibe generated website content fatigue.
The screenshots look nice and the colors are cool, but seeing the repeated phrases and words made me navigate back about 30% through.
can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations?
stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?
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.
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.
Honestly, if I had to start from scratch in my own company, I would pick zulip. That is thread friendly for real, for proper async communication. Slack threads were bolted on as a feature, and it shows. I know that in 2 this is not a problem, but the way that - for example - notifications work for threads when you have 10s (or 100s) of threads is a pain. Finding back threads you were involved with is a huge pain.
I'm in a similar boat but with Telegram.
Pricing and conditions are always subject to change. That was the case with Slack too.
Yeah. We've seen many instances where "forever" isn't actually forever--even sometimes with paid lifetime licenses. I'd be much more excited by a self-hosted option.
This is just another step in a race to the bottom for prices. I don't hate it, but it's also nothing amazing. Flagging messages as decisions is cool (and something AI could do for us) but otherwise it's Just Another Slack competitor.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but 90 day memory loss is a feature, not a bug.
I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.
Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements.
(Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)