Low-cost platform for rolling conversations + filesharing?

June 9, 2023 9:09 AM

I'm part of a pan-university consortium setting up a series of events across Canada. We'd like to find a way to have Teams or Slack-style chat, as well as sharing files and resources, and create a standalone presence for it. What do you recommend?

Free is best, cheap still good. Assume 20-30 people involved at most. At the moment, I don't see a need for massive storage -- 50GB or less, likely. Rather than having one university "own" it all, we'd much prefer to set up a standalone account for the consortium. Teams is a good combination of chat + file sharing + video meetings, but at $5/user/month, even $1-2K a year is too much to spend (partly university budgets, partly working through how to cost-share it would be a giant pain with the monumental red tape behind spending in this setting).

posted by Shepherd to Technology (6 answers total)

Would a Discord server meet your needs?
posted by nkknkk at 9:29 AM on June 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ditto Discord.
posted by kschang at 9:39 AM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I used Basecamp for a similar purpose, though with a smaller number of people. It worked well enough.
posted by akk2014 at 11:58 AM on June 9, 2023

You mentioned Slack-style. Why not Slack? It's free.
posted by emelenjr at 4:37 PM on June 9, 2023

Nextcloud does this well.
posted by deadwax at 6:09 AM on July 15, 2023

If you or someone in your group is able to set up and maintain a server, there are a couple of Slack alternatives that have free self-hosted versions:

• Rocket.chat
• Mattermost

posted by StrawberryPie at 6:45 PM on July 15, 2023