Ask HN: Is there a real reason to pay for things like Slack or Jira?
I’ve been thinking about this and can’t really come up with a good enough reason for companies to pay for these products.
A lot of chat is already solved, you can easily host a number of open source chat servers internally.
A lot of projects are literally just that, a project, with tasks that you can assign to a person and mark it done/not done.
Even something like Dropbox, like, dump shit into a shared drive.
I don’t know, it just feels like the tech version of paying for bottled water.
Should they continue being billion dollar companies? YouTube is determined to keep showing me get-rich quick schemes like starting your own e-commerce store, day trading, etc and it just got me thinking that those schemes work on a lot of people. This dynamic must exist in tech also, and right away all I could think about was these weird things we pay for as devs.
Like, we’re really gonna pay for chat? We’ve lost our minds.
You don't pay for chat. You pay for don't having to worry about hosting a chat.
With your argumentation everyone could do everything themselves but that doesn't work because companies, startups even more so, need to focus on one thing they are good at.
Dropbox is so much easier than a shared drive, especially if you want to share files with external people every once in a while.
Also dropbox works with all OSes. Shared drives are usually a pain if you have a heterogeneous tech landscape in your company. This also includes phones, tablets, and so on.