Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am.
$10/month for 5 users on IRC?
This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service.
I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.
We run an IRC server (all our employees are remote), and spent perhaps 1 hour setting it up on one of our internal ops boxes, and zero hours maintaining it since it's gone up. Uptime is currently in the months.
Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.
It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month.
I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous.
Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
30-60 minutes to set up not only an irc server, but a persistent web client, archiving, and full-text search over channels and private chats? The value for me is seeing what happened after I'd left work yesterday, or finding a discussion/links that were posted a few days ago.
You've just done a better job of marketing grove in two sentences than grove has ever done itself. That's really the point. As it stands, grove.io markets itself as $10/month for 5 users to chat.
The first two words anyone is going to read on grove.io: "Hosted IRC".
Right about there, 80% of people are going to ask "What's IRC?". It's never explained.
"and so much more." Like what?
"plus additional features"... uh...?
"Why Grove is better". Better than what?
Oh look, a feature. Almost, if not completely on some screens, below the fold. "Archives and search"... of what?
Finally, "chat logs". Oh, it's something to do with chat. Well, I already have that!
If anyone even bothers to look at pricing, they're going to wonder why they want to pay somebody for all this.
Meanwhile, at least half the people who already know what IRC is are unimpressed. "IRC? Who uses that anymore? We have IM now. It's free. I even have logs.". Oops. Same problem.
Edit: Meanwhile, an experienced IRC user like me: I run irssi in screen on a reliable server. All my channels and private messages are logged, and I know how to use grep. What's grove for again?
This. Most IRC servers (ircd-seven, InspIRCd, UnrealIRCd, etc.) are rock solid and require very little maintenance if you're not doing more advanced things like linking to other servers, linking to services (ChanServ, NickServ), etc.
Throw ratbox and charybdis into the mix, too - very solid pieces of software!
It is very easy to get any of these running and if you read the docs (or the comments in the config files) there aren't many gotchas either. I wouldn't say they're zero maintenance, but they are fairly low - the majority of the maintenance you'd still have with a hosted server, as it's getting things working exactly how you like, and dealing with troublesome users!
One other point that springs to mind: if people want a free alternative to running their own server or using grove, there are lots of good IRC networks to choose from that will host your channel for free.
There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
That's where our nerdy brains go when confronted with pricing plans, but I'm not sure that the person actually buying this would see it the same way. Imagine that you're a business and you're paying for tools so your employees can actually get work done and make money. Do you really think that when you hire employee #6 (probably for an all-in cost of six figures), you're going to be scrutinizing the bump from $10 / month to $25 / month and trying to figure out what your per-employee cost is? Umm...no. You're going to hit upgrade and move onto something more productive. Or you're not going to be employing anyone for long.
I think they need to revamp their marketing speak and triple their pricing.
I disagree pretty strongly with your comment re: pricing model. For services like this, the incentive to upgrade is going to be there regardless of price, since there's a strong incentive to have your entire company / department using the same tools.
Atlassian is a great example of an extreme version of this. The cost for me to have 10 users (on-premise, but hosted is similar) is $10 ($1 per user). The cost to have 11 is $800 ($75 per user).
It's a smart, if unintuitive pricing model - you can demonstrate the value of your product to cash-strapped startups that are going to be extremely cost-conscious, and start charging more on value once the company has started to see success.
I've never setup that particular ircd, but regardless of what ircd you use, once you add separate services to the mix, you're making life unnecessarily difficult. Separate services daemons are not needed for private IRC servers.
Right, agreed. Services really were the hardest part of it, come to think of it. In this particular case, I was setting up the server for an intended non-private network.
We pay 2/month/user for hipchat, and it's the best money spent each month, with the exception of maybe github.
It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything.
Click, pay, and my world was rocked.
Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.
Going to their pricing page and not getting the information, but instead having to sign up makes me not want to try it at all. Which is a shame, the demo looked good.
The main selling point of Grove over any other IRC provider is the beautiful UI that is easily understandable by non-technical users, and the easy linkability of historical content (for reference in emails, development tickets, etc).
Congratulations to the Grove.io team! Its great that this product is able to keep going.
I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing.
Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it.
Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket.
On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.
Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster.
5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user)
10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user)
20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user)
50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user)
I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.
For the record, I paid their top tier price (actually more than that - they created a custom plan just for us because we had over 50 users) happily for several months (and would have paid 2x more).
First, they have this nice web UI, which means hardcore geeks in the company could use their IRC clients while other people just using the channels ocasionally to get support (not all of them technical staff) can use the web version instead.
If that saved one hour of my infrastructure staff overall (and I am sure it saved quite a bit more than that) it was worth it - hiring first class infrastructure staff is very challenging, so their time is worth gold.
OTOH, sadly the service was unstable/crashed a lot and eventually we gave up and migrated to xmpp.
I actually wish they had charged more, because maybe with that they could have fixed those issues more quickly and I could have avoided another painful migration...
Indeed, as Grove users the stability issues annoyed the heck out of us, too; fixing them is our first priority. As in, I'm already working on it!
I know migrating (again!) is a pain, but if you ever want to give Grove another try, please get in touch (jacob at jacobian.org) and let me know what we'd need to do to get you back.
We pay a similar amount for HipChat, which is basically the same thing as Grove. Most of our users would eat up far more of the costs of just using a service like this dealing with setting up IRC clients, explaining IRC to them, etc. rather than just pointing them to a web app, which is far more familiar.
The problem is, "hosted IRC" is a ridiculously bad marketing strategy. IMO, Grove should view IRC as a backend implementation detail, and not any part of their public offering. The only people who are going to care that Grove is backed by IRC are exactly the people for who hosting an IRC server isn't a big deal for.
Because some businesses just won't use a public IRC server for various policy reasons (including policies required by their own customers), while using a paid server from a third party could be accepted.
* With some legal or contractual obligation preventing use of a public IRC server.
* But not preventing use of a third-party outside-the-firewall solution.
* And not having any criteria for the third-party, such as HIPAA compliance, warranties/guarantees, etc.
Seems a pretty small set...
Interestingly, grove doesn't seem to promise not to disclose the archives of your "private" server at all. Lots of ass-covering in their Terms of Service in favor of grove, and they have a privacy policy pertaining to their website, but nothing I could find about not telling the world whatever you happen to send their IRC servers.
In this thread: software developers who make $1xx / hr complain about paying a monthly fee that's worth less than the time it took to write the comments in question.
Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.
When I clicked this, I assumed it was going to be Grove going back on their statement that they were closing down, and I was concerned. That sort of wavering doesn't bode well for customer trust. In a weird way, I'm glad someone else is in charge not because the Grove team was bad, but from a PR perspective this just looks good.
Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (https://www.flowdock.com). Turns out its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC client compatible!
If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm curious what seemed to be broken.
We already moved to flowdock, it seems better so far, primarily because it's STABLE! When I used grove, the web client was basically unuseable, and even our IRC clients got disconnected periodically. The worse part is, the IRC disconnect was often times silent - as in, you would think that you were signed in, but none of your messages were sent, or you wouldn't actually receive messages. Presence in IRC (the users that it showed as being in the room) would become out of date quickly, and I frequently reconnected just to get an updated list of who was available.
Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?
I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty frontend to IRC?
To the one reply to this: You've been hellbanned - sorry guy. I see some great stuff in your comment history, apparently some overzealous idiot of a mod didn't like that you posted that article on controlling a forum.
I love Grove.io, works for geeks and regular users and easy webhooks. My channel has everything I want and I've never spent longer than a few minutes configuring things.
$10/month for 5 users on IRC?
This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service.
I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.