Cut Me Some Slack, Slack (Premium)

I've long intended to write an article about money in the Behind Thurrott.com series, and I will someday. But doing so is complicated in part because we still don't have a clear understanding of the full financial picture of the site. Money comes in and money goes out, of course. But even now, 8 months after I became the publication's sole owner, we still hit occasional snags in the form of unexpected bills.

Hopefully, most of you aren't as dense as I am when it comes to this kind of thing, but even I understand that this site has both monthly and annual expenses and that these things need to be budgeted and, ideally, predictable. And to help us with this part of the business, George and his accountant prepared a list of the expected expenses on both schedules heading into this transition.

It all sounds easy, or at least straightforward … but it often isn't. And things change. Services we pay for change hands, rebrand, become more expensive, or whatever.  We did what we could proactively to minimize our expenses, working with Robert, the guru who handles our backend web development to shift from expensive AWS-based hosting to a much more reasonable solution with no performance penalties. And we've had to adopt new services for any variety of reasons. Our newsletter partners use Slack, as does Robert and his team of developers. And so we have had to adopt Slack.

Ah, Slack.

Slack is a good example of something that seems straightforward but is not. If you're not familiar with this, you can visit the Slack website and discover that this "productivity platform," this chat-based collaboration solution (as I think of it) comes in both free and paid versions. That the free version is limited to 1:1 "huddles" (ugh) with people inside or outside your organization only, and that a huddle is basically a "conversation" or a "chat" in similar solutions like Microsoft Teams.

And ... fine. But this limitation is a problem for us because Robert and his team, and JR Raphael and the folks at Windows Intelligence, are both obviously outside our organization. Meaning, I have to pay for Slack.

And Slack Pro is actually pretty expensive given the benefits to me: For $7.25 per user per month (when you pay for a full year at once, so $87 per user per year), you get a variety of additional features, including the crucial ability to "huddle" (God, I f#$%ing hate that word) with more than a single person inside or outside of our organization. By comparison, our Google Workspace Business Starter accounts are only $6 per user per month, or $72 per year. As is my Microsoft 365 Basic account. And these accounts provide many, many more features than does Slack.

But Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 share other similarities. You can upgrade an account to get significant additional benefits, for starters: A Google Workspace Business Standard account gets 2 TB of storage vs. 30 GB for $12 per month, for example, while a Microsoft 365 Business Standa...