"Thousands a year" is a rounding error for any company that has the 20+ employees it takes to get to "thousands a year" in Slack bills. Those employees are costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
I think you are seeing it from the strongly-VC-backed startup perspective. In any company I've worked for that kind of expense needs to be justified. Sure, that's a small fraction compared to salaries, but there will be many such "needs" for many small fractions, and if they are not watched after they add up pretty quickly.
I think you are seeing it from the strongly-VC-backed startup perspective.
I feel I can pretty authoritatively answer "Betcha not" here. </cofounder>
It's trivial to justify Slack's pricetag at any software company. Your entire team lives in it continuously and it becomes the nerve center of the company... for freaking pennies. It's ludicrous. If you add it up the non-Starfighter companies I run spend like $50k a year on SaaS/hosting/etc ("everything with an API attached") of which Slack is like ~1%, and probably the most underpriced-relative-to-value service which does not quote its pricing in picodollars.
That's how you get bloated budgets. Why spend thousands of dollars per year on a communications platform if you don't need to spend it?
IRC, mattermost, email, Gitlab, Wekan, Skype/Google Hangouts/BigBlueButton.... there are plenty of tools to communicate without spending loads of cash.
None of those tools work as well as Slack out of the box. Some of them require significant work to integrate with other web services. That's time your staff is spending on those projects rather than your core product.
Seriously, Slack was the EASIEST things to justify as an expense when we proposed it to upper management earlier this year. And they are known to be very stingy.
why use macs (or Dells) instead of a cheap china-built off-brand PC? Why use fancy Pilot G2s instead of 10/$1 bic pens? Why use ${SuperiorProduct} instead of ${InferiorProduct}? Because it has value outside of the immediate short-term economic value.
Of course, it is always a matter of perceived utility. I buy really nice food sometimes, because my happiness gained from the delicious steak is worth it.
I might hypothetically use an open source tool instead of Slack because it's not worth $2000 of productivity for 15 people per year.
