Man, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.
Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
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Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#42We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#43If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
Frankly, not having an alternative identified for all hosted corporate services and maybe even at the ready with regularly maintained deployment and transition plans is and long has been reckless at this point.
Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion.
Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#44I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up. It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bit…
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#45If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
I'd get off ASAP.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#46Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#47> a pretty massive sum of money I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.
It's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can afford it (or borrow it).
I'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#48Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed…
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#49Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?
Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
So it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan.
That's a different story altogether and makes more sense for the timeline involved.
If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#50So many stories like this about Slack. We use Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too