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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

#231

“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.

A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.

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

#233
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…

Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.

Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.

I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.

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

#234
post #57

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.)

Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here

I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

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

#235

“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.

A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.

VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.

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

#236
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.

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

#237

For those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl). Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work. The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open. For day t…

Are you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?) (Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Elem…

I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.

If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.

Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.

Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people would stop recommending it until such time it works well.

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

#239
post #31

I genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and getting nothing. Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on…

It's a sign of a really poor decision making process.

They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in their workplace.

Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front of those students.

See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling/documentation.

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

#240

We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version). I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?

I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances. You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team? Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-…

I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately. I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
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