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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

#111

Post by gxs »

onetimeusename wrote: post #85
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…

I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange. It was things like "internally hosted wikis were…

As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use

Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools

Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that

It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression

Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them

I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools

All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example

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

#112

Post by joshstrange »

Kirth wrote: post #100
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…

Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?

95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.

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

#113

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

Kirth wrote: post #100
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…

Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?

In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

fn-mote wrote: 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.)

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by dismalpedigree »

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.

Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.

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

#117

Post by blackoil »

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.

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

#118

Post by aramsh »

arp242 wrote: post #9

Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?

Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year

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

#119

Post by sadeshmukh »

arp242 wrote: post #9

Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?

It was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and there was a special contract drawn with HC (that's the 5000/yr mentioned in the original post).

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

#120

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk.

It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.

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