Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

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.

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 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

I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous).

Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.

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

> $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 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).

[0]: https://twist.com

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.

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.

Beyond that, a key risk that has been brought into focus more and more lately is data portability and vendor lock-in. At this point I do not deploy a new vendor without documenting the exit strategy.

The best exit strategy you can offer is an open source, self-hostable version of the product with a simple migration plan. Some of the other existing competitors in the enterprise chat space already offer this. Even if no-one uses it, by offering it you keep your priorities aligned with your customers.

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.

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.

> 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 felt like a baker was selling me "delicious pastries" but with the tray covered. I want to see what I am getting before signing up!

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

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???")

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.

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.

This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.

Slack used to have a generous free tier, until they stopped having it.

0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...

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.

Should be 2026, happy new year!

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!

stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?

hard passsssss