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.

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.

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.

Any way to migrate my data from slack to Dock?

> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.

So, are you a U.S.-based technology company?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act?wprov=sfla1

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.

Then your iteration stays ~ the same.

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.

They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.

That makes teams very sticky.

Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.

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

Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

* Fully open and interoperable protocol: We had it (XMPP), it was flawed, but at one beautiful moment in time it worked and using same protocol I could contact both google and facebook contacts. Then the companies decided "no, we would prefer to keep a walled gardens rather than make it easy to move to competition.

* Fully open source (no open core nonsense, latest Mattermost rugpull from OSS part users being one example why) chat platform with corporate backing and SaaS option - there is Matrix but afaik it is lacking feature-wise, tho I havent used it much. With plugin app store so it is possible to make and even sell integrations with other systems.

Second option seems more viable but it takes a lot of effort to make something as good as Slack or Discord

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

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.

Until they get bought by Broadcom and deem you too small to waste time on.

Would adopting the OP put you in a different position?

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.

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

after 4 years we're almost at the point where i feel its worth spending $ for different types of convinient features.

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

Some users will never hit more than few GBs as it will be near only text. Other people will share 100MB video clips daily or use it as easy way to transfer files betweeen users in company

Maybe have option to expire attachements at separate timer or ability to set a cap where oldest files get removed if it is passed for cost-control-concious companies

> $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.

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.

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.

I've been using it for a small startup, not in a regulated space (not defense, fintech). So far no issue, but I keep thinking I'm missing something (maybe it's just "You use gamerz tool for work lol???")

But other than that it's better chat platform than any other I used and it is very versatile when it comes to programming it, if you need it. Making flow like "you need to go thru the rules, then you get access to rest of the server" is possible, I even saw cool stuff like "click this reaction to get subscribed to that group of channels"

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).

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383675

[0]: https://twist.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...

Should be 2026, happy new year!

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.

This gives you full ownership of your data, instant search (even offline), and naturally supports the kind of privacy/custody requirements you're describing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.

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!

Any more FOMO bits on their page?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Not a lawyer, and thankfully, never deposed.)