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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

#861

Post by 2b3a51 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #767
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

They're shaking everyone down, it's been going on for years. They want huge sums of money to maintain chat history. I'm watching orgs left and right move to teams, not because it's better in anyway, but because it's basically free.

"This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."

The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.

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

#862

Post by dakial1 »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

Great you are owning the mistake and fixing it.

May I suggest a public post mortem so that the doubters can see that you went after the root cause?

Might be interesting for HN as well as big companies have mistakes in policy, teams and automated collections...

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

#863

Post by elzbardico »

matwood wrote: post #532
luckman212 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?

My sales people love it.

Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.

Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.

Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.

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

#864

Post by sharts »

fasbiner wrote: post #797
seamanrob wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit. Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who di…

This is the new way of doing business. Rip off as much as you can until there is enough publicity around your bad behavior such that it may affect your bottom line.

And then say sorry to convey some kind of human connection in the hopes you will be forgiven and the bottom line can be raised again.

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

#865

Post by darig »

fasbiner wrote: post #797
seamanrob wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit. Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who di…

[dead]

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

#867

Post by yogurtboy »

dhdresser wrote: post #838
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing. Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible…

The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).

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

#868

Post by jcul »

RealityVoid wrote: post #654
Aurornis wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored. I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m n…

It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.

Not quite, even the name is based on "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".

The value for me is in the search, recall, history.

If it was just a chat app I'd much sooner use matrix or IRC.

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

#869

Post by drewbitt »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.

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

#870

Post by jenadine »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

Since everything is being fixed, does that mean that "Hack Club" is not going to move to mattermost after all?
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