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.
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...
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.
We pay a similar amount for HipChat, which is basically the same thing as Grove. Most of our users would eat up far more of the costs of just using a service like this dealing with setting up IRC clients, explaining IRC to them, etc. rather than just pointing them to a web app, which is far more familiar.
The problem is, "hosted IRC" is a ridiculously bad marketing strategy. IMO, Grove should view IRC as a backend implementation detail, and not any part of their public offering. The only people who are going to care that Grove is backed by IRC are exactly the people for who hosting an IRC server isn't a big deal for.
Because some businesses just won't use a public IRC server for various policy reasons (including policies required by their own customers), while using a paid server from a third party could be accepted.
* With some legal or contractual obligation preventing use of a public IRC server.
* But not preventing use of a third-party outside-the-firewall solution.
* And not having any criteria for the third-party, such as HIPAA compliance, warranties/guarantees, etc.
Seems a pretty small set...
Interestingly, grove doesn't seem to promise not to disclose the archives of your "private" server at all. Lots of ass-covering in their Terms of Service in favor of grove, and they have a privacy policy pertaining to their website, but nothing I could find about not telling the world whatever you happen to send their IRC servers.
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.