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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Retention, history & “90‑day memory loss”

  • Some want configurable auto-deletion (e.g., 90 days) to keep chat ephemeral; others see long-term history as critical “documentation by search.”
  • Legal/compliance often drive retention (e.g., purge after 180/365 days unless in discovery). Several argue chat should not be the system of record; decisions should be documented elsewhere.
  • Multiple people say Slack’s 90‑day cap is both a pain (losing context) and, in some contexts (informal or ex-employee channels), a useful feature.

Pricing, “free forever” and sustainability

  • Flat, per-team pricing (not per user) is widely liked, especially for small teams, contractors, and volunteers where per-seat Slack pricing is prohibitive.
  • Commenters doubt “free forever / unlimited” claims and prefer clearly stated limits or storage-based pricing, warning about future walk-backs.
  • Some suggest generous but explicit caps and/or selling extra storage; fear of “shadow caps” and bait‑and‑switch is common.

Integrations, workflows & network effects

  • Biggest barrier to leaving Slack/Teams is integrations: CI/CD, alerts, ticketing, internal apps, external partner channels, and custom workflows.
  • Several argue a Slack competitor must support webhooks, APIs, and ecosystem tooling (Zapier, etc.) or it will be relegated to very small teams.
  • Dock explicitly says it’s not targeting “Slack as OS” enterprise setups, but 5–50 person teams stuck on Slack’s paywall.

Architecture, security & data sovereignty

  • Dock pitches Cloudflare Workers + custom CRDT/local-first engine as a 100x cost advantage; multiple replies challenge this at scale, highlighting expensive per-request/CPU pricing vs VMs/Kubernetes.
  • Local-first sync and EU data residency options appeal to some, but others insist that without self-hosting or non-US infra, vendor lock-in and CLOUD Act–type issues remain.
  • Lack of default end-to-end encryption is questioned; Dock argues E2EE complicates search and multi-device UX, considering it only for special “secure channels.”

Clients, UX & marketing

  • PWA-first approach concerns people who see native mobile apps and reliable notifications as non-negotiable (especially for on-call). Some propose short-term webview wrappers.
  • Several criticize “vibecoded” marketing copy, steep annual discounting, and anti-bloat messaging that seems to just reflect missing features.
  • There’s noticeable distrust of seemingly LLM-written founder replies and of another proprietary, non–self-hostable SaaS in a crowded field of Slack alternatives (Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Twist, etc.).