I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands.

We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.

So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things. Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain, works well across devices without any limitations. We control everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities. So yeah, thanks slack.

Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd love to self-host in the mid-term.

In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.

After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.