[HN Gopher] Show HN: Dock - Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-d...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Dock - Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
Author : yadavrh
Score : 8 points
Date : 2026-01-18 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (getdock.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (getdock.io)
| yadavrh wrote:
| Hey HN - I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a
| founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search,
| unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90
| days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and
| sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant,
| secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare.
|
| Early stage - would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same
| pain.
| Xorlev wrote:
| > Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited
| history.
|
| 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
| yadavrh wrote:
| Great point. We're launching with a clear Fair Usage Policy
| to address exactly that--preventing abuse (like the
| "filesystem" hack) while keeping it truly unlimited for
| actual team communication. Our cost structure is different
| than legacy players; because we're built on Cloudflare + our
| custom CRDT-hybrid store, the overhead for storing and
| searching text is low enough that we can avoid those
| arbitrary 90-day or 2-year cutoffs without it being a
| sustainability risk. We'll be publishing our explicit "human
| use" guidelines on the site soon so there's no "shadow" cap
| anxiety for legitimate teams.
| jms703 wrote:
| Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention
| becomes my documentation and I don't want that.
| OJFord wrote:
| Use Slack? The pitch here is _minus_ that retention limit.
| yadavrh wrote:
| That's a fair point! While we default to unlimited history
| (since the 90-day hard limit is a pain for most), we plan to
| let admins set custom retention policies. If you want messages
| to auto-delete after 90 days to keep things ephemeral, you'll
| be able to configure that. We don't want to force 'chat as
| docs' on teams who prefer it temporary.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I
| see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.
|
| 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.
| yadavrh wrote:
| Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team.
| $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-
| seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do. External
| Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest
| Access" so you can invite external partners to specific
| channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge
| per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill
| like it does on Slack. Apps: We are launching as a high-
| performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home
| screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than
| maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are
| coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-18 23:00 UTC)