Team Communication

Slack Pro costs $8.75 per user per month. At 40 people that is $4,200 per year. Add Intercom or Zendesk for customer support, another $85 to $150 per seat per month for support agents. and your communication tools alone are consuming a significant fraction of your operational budget.

Beyond cost, there is the ownership problem. Your team's entire conversation history, shared files, and institutional knowledge lives in Slack's database. If you cancel, the history is gone. If Slack changes its pricing or terms, you have no leverage. The same applies to Intercom: your entire customer communication history is in their system.

For internal team messaging, we deploy Matrix with the Element client as our default recommendation. Matrix is an open communication protocol with end-to-end encryption enabled by default. Every message is encrypted before it leaves the sender's device. This is not a configuration option; it is the default behaviour. For teams handling client data, legal communications, or confidential business discussions, this matters.

Element is available on web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Channels, direct messages, threads, file sharing, emoji reactions, and search all work as your team expects. For teams that need a more Slack-like interface or require extensive bot integrations, we deploy Rocket.Chat instead, which has a broader feature set at the cost of higher server resource requirements.

We migrate your Slack history. Channels, direct messages, and shared files carry over. We run the new platform in parallel with Slack for one to two weeks so your team is comfortable before you cancel the subscription.

For customer-facing support, we deploy FreeScout, a self-hosted help desk that replaces Help Scout, Intercom's inbox features, or Freshdesk for teams that primarily handle support through email. FreeScout gives your support team a shared inbox, assignment, canned replies, notes, and customer history. That covers the core functionality that makes support manageable, without per-agent licensing.

For teams that need live chat on their website in addition to email support, we configure a chat widget that connects to FreeScout, keeping all customer communication in one place. All customer support history lives on your server.

For distributed and remote teams, we deploy a WireGuard-based team VPN alongside the communication stack. WireGuard is a modern VPN protocol that is faster and simpler to maintain than OpenVPN or IPSec, with a smaller attack surface.

The team VPN connects your team members to your self-hosted services (Nextcloud, Matrix, internal tools) over an encrypted connection without exposing those services to the public internet. New team members are added in two minutes through a simple web interface. The client is available on all platforms.