u/TeamCultureBuilder

I'm thinking about starting a Slack community for recruiters and talent professionals to network, share insights, and help each other out. Nothing product-related, just a genuine space for people in the industry to connect.

But when I looked at Slack's pricing I got confused. The pro plan is $7.25 per user per month. For a community of even 500 people that's over $3,600/month. And I see Slack communities with thousands of members that are clearly not charging dues or running on massive budgets.

So what am I missing? Are these large communities all running on the free plan and just dealing with the 90-day message history limit? Is there a community or nonprofit discount I don't know about? Are some of them grandfathered into old pricing?

For anyone running or managing a Slack community with 500+ members, how are you actually handling this? Wondering:

What plan you're on and what it actually costs you at scale. Whether the free plan limitations (message history, integrations) are a dealbreaker or totally manageable for a networking community. Any gotchas you wish you knew before you started. Whether you considered Discord or something else and why you stuck with Slack.

I want to build this the right way from the start instead of migrating 1000 people six months in because I picked the wrong setup. Appreciate any real-world experience here.

I have an employee who's good when they're actually working but getting them to consistently show up has been hard.

It's never the same excuse twice. Car trouble one week, a doctor's appointment the next, then a family emergency, then they're not feeling well, then their internet is down. Each one sounds reasonable but when you look at the pattern over 2 months, they've missed or partially missed something like 15 days.

The hard part is that I genuinely can't tell if this person is going through a rough stretch in life and needs support, or if they've figured out exactly how much they can get away with.

I've had the soft conversation already. The "hey, I've noticed some attendance stuff, everything okay?" talk. Got a vague "yeah just been a lot going on" and things improved for about 2 weeks before the pattern started again.

I don't want to jump straight to a PIP because like I said, the actual work quality is fine and I don't want to lose someone good over attendance if there's a real underlying issue. But I also can't keep covering for them with the rest of the team because it's starting to affect morale. Other people notice when someone is consistently not around and they're picking up the slack.

How do you draw the line between being empathetic and being taken advantage of? At what point do you escalate it formally?