Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.
My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.
Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
>You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.
We did that at my previous job during covid because we also though maintenance would only be a couple of hours of effort. It didn't work out that easy. It became a full time job so it was scrapped. People underestimate the amount of effort required maintaining on-prem infra across an org to match what cloud hypersacler providers offer.
potentially wrapping their own package or distro rather than using something like ESS Community? Or perhaps they left registration open and had abuse problems?
18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
