Grove is here to stay

https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay

by jacobian • 14 years ago

93 51 14 years ago

grove.io

patrickaljord• 14 years ago

Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

thedjpetersen• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the Grove.io team! Its great that this product is able to keep going.

I have been following Grove.io pretty closely. This is a subject that is fairly interesting to me and compelled me to look at some of the different open source options[0], as they do exist for teams that are able to run their own chat. I decided to write my own chat client with a fellow HNer called Subway[1], since I could not find a good open source web client that persisted a connection while a user was offline. After I started I found another large project that more or less accomplishes the same thing called Alice[2] written in Perl. Both these clients have more or less the same goal to persist your connection while you are offline. For those interested in a paid alternative to grove there is also IRCCloud[3] which accomplishes the same thing.

[0] http://www.thedjpetersen.com/blog/comparing_webchat_options/

[1] https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway

[2] https://github.com/leedo/alice

[3] https://irccloud.com/

stephen_mcd• 14 years ago

Here's my own one I recently built: https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty

Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it.

Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket.

On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.

seryl• 14 years ago

"Grove is here to stay"... clicks link

> curl -i https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Server: nginx/1.1.17 Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 193 Connection: close

<html> <head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center> </body> </html>

Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!

frankwiles2• 14 years ago

Yeah apparently the blog wasn't up to HN level traffic! I'll get that sorted out asap!

dchuk• 14 years ago

When I clicked this, I assumed it was going to be Grove going back on their statement that they were closing down, and I was concerned. That sort of wavering doesn't bode well for customer trust. In a weird way, I'm glad someone else is in charge not because the Grove team was bad, but from a PR perspective this just looks good.

hnuser100• 14 years ago

500 Internal Server Error

nginx/1.1.17

aggronn• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this product. Please let me know if I am.

$10/month for 5 users on IRC?

This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service.

I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.

mibbitier• 14 years ago

Imagine if they did it for email...

"Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails."

As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.

asdf333• 14 years ago

not everyone wants to worry about managing a vps.

you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.

simonw• 14 years ago

"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo"

If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL.

Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.

problemdomain4• 14 years ago

It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month.

I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous.

Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.

jperras• 14 years ago

We run an IRC server (all our employees are remote), and spent perhaps 1 hour setting it up on one of our internal ops boxes, and zero hours maintaining it since it's gone up. Uptime is currently in the months.

Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.

mratzloff• 14 years ago

I really can't upvote this enough. They were selling the wrong thing.

martindale2• 14 years ago

The main selling point of Grove over any other IRC provider is the beautiful UI that is easily understandable by non-technical users, and the easy linkability of historical content (for reference in emails, development tickets, etc).

andrewljohnson• 14 years ago

We pay 2/month/user for hipchat, and it's the best money spent each month, with the exception of maybe github.

It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything.

Click, pay, and my world was rocked.

Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.

Numberwang• 14 years ago

Going to their pricing page and not getting the information, but instead having to sign up makes me not want to try it at all. Which is a shame, the demo looked good.

jslatts• 14 years ago

Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (https://www.flowdock.com). Turns out its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC client compatible!

zalzane2• 14 years ago

Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster.

5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user) 10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user) 20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user) 50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user)

I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.

thibaut_barrere2• 14 years ago

I know a good bunch of 2 to 5 sized companies that would pay for that, all highly competent people (and able to do that themselves).

They are just "outsourcing" the low-value stuff in favor of their core business.

zalzane2• 14 years ago

For a 2 to 5 size company, I don't see why they don't just use a public IRC server and set mode +irsp to a private channel.

igorhvr• 14 years ago

Nonsense - their service is extremely cheap.

For the record, I paid their top tier price (actually more than that - they created a custom plan just for us because we had over 50 users) happily for several months (and would have paid 2x more).

First, they have this nice web UI, which means hardcore geeks in the company could use their IRC clients while other people just using the channels ocasionally to get support (not all of them technical staff) can use the web version instead.

If that saved one hour of my infrastructure staff overall (and I am sure it saved quite a bit more than that) it was worth it - hiring first class infrastructure staff is very challenging, so their time is worth gold.

OTOH, sadly the service was unstable/crashed a lot and eventually we gave up and migrated to xmpp.

I actually wish they had charged more, because maybe with that they could have fixed those issues more quickly and I could have avoided another painful migration...

jacobian• 14 years ago

Indeed, as Grove users the stability issues annoyed the heck out of us, too; fixing them is our first priority. As in, I'm already working on it!

I know migrating (again!) is a pain, but if you ever want to give Grove another try, please get in touch (jacob at jacobian.org) and let me know what we'd need to do to get you back.

mutru2• 14 years ago

And https://www.flowdock.com/ is still going to be around, with way better reliability, IRC support, more and better integrations & much more. :)

A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-acc...

martindale2• 14 years ago

This is awesome, but appears to be broken right now.

mutru2• 14 years ago

If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm curious what seemed to be broken.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty frontend to IRC?

Why does this exist?

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

To the one reply to this: You've been hellbanned - sorry guy. I see some great stuff in your comment history, apparently some overzealous idiot of a mod didn't like that you posted that article on controlling a forum.

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

It's unbelievable how many haters there are. Unbelievable.

dustywusty• 14 years ago

Interestingly, their email lacked an unsubscribe link.

frankwiles2• 14 years ago

That's a big oversight, email me frank@revsys.com and I'll make sure you don't receive anymore email. I hate that shit, our bad.

apiengine• 14 years ago

I love Grove.io, works for geeks and regular users and easy webhooks. My channel has everything I want and I've never spent longer than a few minutes configuring things.

ryanwaggoner2• 14 years ago

In this thread: software developers who make $1xx / hr complain about paying a monthly fee that's worth less than the time it took to write the comments in question.

Makes me glad I don't sell to software developers.

hogu• 14 years ago

We already moved to flowdock, it seems better so far, primarily because it's STABLE! When I used grove, the web client was basically unuseable, and even our IRC clients got disconnected periodically. The worse part is, the IRC disconnect was often times silent - as in, you would think that you were signed in, but none of your messages were sent, or you wouldn't actually receive messages. Presence in IRC (the users that it showed as being in the room) would become out of date quickly, and I frequently reconnected just to get an updated list of who was available.

Can anyone who worked at grove comment on this? IRC is rock solid, so I don't understand how it could have been made so unstable? Did you guys have to implement your own IRC server in order to incorporate some Grove features?

dualogy• 14 years ago

Grove St. OGs fo'life, homies, fo'life!

kevinprince• 14 years ago

This really should be sold as a chat for your business which just happens to use IRC underneath.

arunagarwal• 14 years ago

checkout this new upcoming thingy.. https://catchuphere.com/pages/beta

Grove is here to stay

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