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Dock

Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

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Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare.Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.

HN · launched Jan 18, 2026 · 177 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views

Niche: team and live chat software · 81 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▲ +14% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Communication
  • B2B
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 81 launches in team and live chat software →

Could you build this?

Partial While basic chat rooms and markdown document editors are easily vibe-coded, an enterprise-grade Slack competitor requires high-reliability real-time sync, WebRTC meeting infrastructure, and offline-first client architectures.

What it would actually take: A production implementation requires an Elixir/Phoenix or Go-based WebSocket cluster backed by Redis pub/sub for low-latency message distribution and presence tracking. The search layer demands full-text indexing via Meilisearch or Elasticsearch, while WebRTC conferencing relies on selective forwarding units like LiveKit. Multi-platform desktop and mobile clients require robust local SQLite caching and conflict-free delta sync protocols to maintain state across network drops.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: WhatsApp group chat, Email, Signal, Discord, Slack

Concerns raised: Too few features compared to free alternatives like Discord and Signal, Unclear value proposition versus existing communication tools, Not ready for users to try (waitlist signup, not functional product), Lack of product visibility - no screenshots or demo video shown

Feature requests: Screenshots or demo video of UI/UX on homepage, Search functionality details, Discussion of tech stack choices (e.g., OpenSearch)

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 154 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #8 of 155 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 78 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.