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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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

#121

Post by layman51 »

There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?

I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.

[0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...

[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro

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

#122

Post by tuesdaynight »

jayknight wrote: post #73
thiagoperes wrote: post #42

We’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.

Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.

I had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using Teams was a daily battle.

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

#123

Post by Fernicia »

blackoil wrote: post #117
wpm wrote: post #15

I 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…

Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.

"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"

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

#124

Post by trhway »

blackoil wrote: post #117
wpm wrote: post #15

I 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…

Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.

Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar.

Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.

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

#125

Post by kragen »

Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups.

You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.

When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.

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

#127

Post by gregmac »

wpm wrote: post #15

I 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…

> refuse to let them export it

Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.

You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.

Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).

But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

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

#128

Post by casparvitch »

syntaxing wrote: post #54
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).

Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!

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

#130

Post by brookst »

wpm wrote: post #15

I 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…

Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business.

If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.

I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.

But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.

I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.

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