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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

mahadk.com

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Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#51

Post by realityfactchex »

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.

Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].

Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?

Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.

  [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) 
  [1] https://zulip.com

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#54

Post by syntaxing »

armada651 wrote: post #30

> 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.

To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#55

Post by davidcollantes »

amarant wrote: post #50
kfogel wrote: post #14

So 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 n…

See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#56

Post by smelendez »

randyrand wrote: post #40

Wow, 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…

Makes some sense to me.

In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.

And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.

You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#57

Post by fn-mote »

I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....

https://hackclub.com/

(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#58

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

junar wrote: post #33

I really wish this post had more details. How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing? If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?

Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#59

Post by donatj »

> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable

Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.

Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.

For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#60

Post by [deleted] »

amarant wrote: post #50
kfogel wrote: post #14

So 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 n…

[deleted]
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