Charge for a Slack App?
Hey everyone!
I'm curious of the possibility to charge for a slack app. Seems like a lot of slack apps are connected to a full on product. So in most cases the slack app is free but the company is paying for the main product.
In my case I'm looking at the possibilities for a slack app where it is the main application in itself. Do companies pay for these? Do you know of examples? Know of any successful business built off of only a slack app?
Thanks!
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Yep! It's common. I run two. One < a year old doing $2500/month and one I launched on the side a bit over the month ago doing < $100/month
There's some nuances to making it work I still haven't perfected (who is responsible for billing, how to manage users, what type of pricing makes sense). There's a huge range of Slack teams as well - ranging from small non-profit teams to massive teams of 1,000's.
But people seem fine paying for Slack apps.
Nice! that sounds good. I'm in the middle of building mine. Should launch in the next month.
I wonder if Polly makes money? My work Slack instance has it installed but all of us almost certainly refuse to pay money for a polling function.
There is definitely magic out there worth paying for. In my field (analytics), people seem to be willing to pay for Slack connectivity to metrics - any of anomaly detection, regular updates, or NLP data query all seem active. (Shout out to @gainsightsPatrick working on the anomaly detection case).
Look at where there's money outside of Slack, then tie that in to Slack and charge for the convenience and cool factor.
Thanks yeah that makes sense!
I know Polly is venture backed and has 10 employees but not sure if they are actually making much money. They have been around for a little while so I would guess that they are.
Looking mostly at tying in Intercom to Slack. Lots of bigger companies pay for Intercom so hopefully there are some extra functionality they'd like to have in Slack that they'd be willing to pay for. Doing lots of customer discovery in this right now.
I run https://appreviewbot.com which is at its core a Slack bot! It has had fairly consistent growth just from being listed in the Slack app directory. It is by no means a big business today but happy to answer any questions you might have!
Hey @freezegun quick question for ya, for paid slack apps how does the payment actually happen? Most of the paid apps I see are free to add to slack, with free trial first (time based or user based), then up to the paid tiers (either pay per user or tiers based on number of tiers). How does this last part going from free to paid actually get implemented? Thanks 🙏
Hey @denisjlin, good question! For AppReviewBot, we allow people to install and try out the Slack integration for a couple of weeks to see if it is adding value for them as expected.
At the end of the two week period, we send a Slack message and an e-mail letting them know that their free trial has ended and that they can continue receiving their reviews in Slack by subscribing to one of our plans. We link out to our pricing page and that's it!
ah okay gotcha, so once the trial is up you pause the service in slack until you receive payment, and you re-direct them to your own page outside of slack to accept the payment 👍 perfect, exactly the info what I was looking for! thanks a bunch
Exactly, no problem!
Hey thats awesome! It would be great to chat to hear your experience.
Two that I have found so far:
https://www.watercoolertrivia.com
https://www.polly.ai
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I'm not focusing on my bank account. I'm focusing on making something that solves a problem. But I also want to have an idea if people are willing to pay for it. Because that is needed to make a successful business.
I'm asking about slack apps because I'm wanting to know if that is normal for slack users to be willing to pay for an integration or are they expecting them to be free.
Kind of like mobile apps. A lot of people expect them to be free.
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Sounds good!