Do we need another Slack?

When we started building Raven, our first question wasn’t: “How much should we charge people for team chat?” It was: “Should team chat even be something you have to pay for?”

Most team communication tools follow a familiar SaaS model: charge per user, limit what the free version can do, and make the bill grow as the company grows. But communication is fundamental infrastructure inside a team. The more people who need to participate, the more useful it becomes. So why should adding another person also mean adding another fee?

In this talk, I’ll share why we chose to build an open-source alternative to Slack and how that philosophy shaped Raven.