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

I'd love a self hosted version of something that isn't IRC, allows easy sharing if media. Decoupling from US based companies seems to be prudent with the USA threatening war on the EU and any tools that can help us do that are welcome. I would not use this tool simply because it is not increasing self reliance, it just exchanges one US based company for several others.

I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.

In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.

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.

Just wondering: Does anyone here use Discord as a Slack alternative? Meaning for Work™. Why and why not?

I've been using it for a small startup, not in a regulated space (not defense, fintech). So far no issue, but I keep thinking I'm missing something (maybe it's just "You use gamerz tool for work lol???")

I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat

I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack

The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale

How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?

How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?

How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?

What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?

Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?

I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does

This caught my eye:

> $50 /month

> $300/year if paid annually

I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!

Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":

> Feature circus

> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?

This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.

People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.

> 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

© 2025 dock. your team's home base.

Should be 2026, happy new year!

Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor.

I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams.

Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord.

Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing.

Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need.

The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).

The reasoning behind the product seems incredibly similar to Twist[0]. What would be the key differences besides “new is always better”?

[0]: https://twist.com

Is there any option to self-host in an air-gapped environment?

I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell.

Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.

How is it different from Zulip?

Slack but better UX/pricing, sure, but the real reason everyone is on Slack is network effects and integrations. External partners force you onto Slack even if you hate the pricing, and there is other lock-in (CI/CD webhooks, monitoring alerts, support ticketing).

I like the concept, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't just switch to something like https://once.com/campfire which is self-hostable and completely free.

I don't know if I like the marketing. A deeply discounted product obviously has some appeal, but it's at odds with the "chat that just works" messaging that suggests an advantage in reliability or UI and that will realistically take time to mature enough to be at parity, let alone ahead.

Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…

Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.

Personally if I'm going to start from scratch/square one I would want to pick something with the MS Teams model of forcing everything to be a "post" with threaded comments. Too much of Slack is wading through a mix of back-and-forth comments, proper threads, and DMs trying to piece together latest updates

Can I configure 90 retention limit? Chat with > 90 day retention becomes my documentation and I don't want that.

What would make me and my users move to an alternative comes down to the integrations and the seamless mobile transition.

The chat part, channels, tagging and upload of asset isn't enough, there are already alternatives to slack offering this that are open source.

I love what you're offering, I hope you get there.

This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product).

Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.

It says no bloat, is that a nod to it being built with something other than Electron?

Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system.

0 - https://support.apple.com/guide/imac/the-dock-apd4b7fb731f/m...

Why does every vibe coded site has a grid background? I know because my current 2 projects I inherited has the same background, all vibe coded.

From the FAQ as to how they are so cheap...

> Our technical infrastructure is our secret weapon. We're built from the ground up on Cloudflare's global edge network using reactive systems and local-first architecture. With modern, secure network protocols, we've reduced infrastructure costs by 100x compared to Slack or Teams. Their systems were built over a decade ago on legacy infrastructure that can't be easily modernized. We started fresh—and pass those savings directly to you.

...but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Cloudflare's products are value-add on value-add, they're a long way from raw infrastructure costs. At a small scale the fact you can pay as you go might mean they're cheaper than VMs or machines to get a good UX, but at scale they're hugely expensive.

Their technical infrastructure sounds like their Achilles heel in the long run.

What I really want is an auth system like Github. Let me create my user account and bring it with me to one or more organizations.

This woyld make inviting people from other orgs incredibly easy.

Slack was originally more or less “better irc”. Can we not just make better irc?

IMHO, instead of 90-day memory loss, use an LRU eviction strategy.

kudos for posting a Show HN.

not doubting it's useful but it feels very vibecoded

> Async messages for deep work. Real-time chat when it matters. Work across timezones without the noise.

What does that even mean?

I encourage you to rewrite the copy and drop the emoji.

your CTA at the top is "join waitlist_" with that funky underscore cursor but there's a free version I can "get started free" now? doesn't add up

also I think the winner approach here open core like twenty.com. let people build on it, but charge for hosting it

just my $0.02. good luck!

Just another SaaS whose promises we are forced to trust, but have no way of ensuring they keep them. No self-hosting option?

I really don't aee how anyone would migrate to this. The "bloat" of Slack is also years of people making third-party integrations work, which Dock will probably never have until and unless it gains a significant amount of regular users.

it seems like a product launching in this space in 2026 should have seamless and default e2ee for everything...

I know it’s probably your MVP website and I may be in the minority here but..

I guess I have vibe generated website content fatigue.

The screenshots look nice and the colors are cool, but seeing the repeated phrases and words made me navigate back about 30% through.

can someone tell me why won't a matrix server suffice in most situations?

stable protocol, ability to federate, rooms/channels... what is lacking?

Pricing and conditions are always subject to change. That was the case with Slack too.

yawn, if i can't self host then you've already locked my data in.

hard passsssss

Unpopular opinion maybe, but 90 day memory loss is a feature, not a bug.

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