Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Overview of this book

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots. You’ll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer. Throughout the book, you’ll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Monetizing your bot


Monetizing your bot, of course, is entirely optional and how you monetize it is dependent on the function of your bot and whether there is a market. Bear in mind that if your goal is to sell your bots for a one-off price, the Slack app directory does not support monetary transfers.

All apps in the app directive are free to install, but how you convert your user base to paying customers is left up to you.

There are a variety of methods to do this and there is no single correct way or Slack-sanctioned method. A popular method employed by companies such as Zoho Expense (https://www.zoho.com/us/expense/slack-integration/) is a payment plan based on users. The service is free for small teams, but once you require more than three users to have access, you have to migrate to a paid tier.

The idea here is similar to APIs we have encountered, such as Wolfram Alpha. This means using a tiered approach where a free tier exists (tied either to amount of calls made or an expiration date...