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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

#141

Post by sqs »

cmckn wrote: post #129

I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812... In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.

It's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all around the world.

You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)

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

#142

Post by delfinom »

flunhat wrote: post #37

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x). A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to b…

It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.

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

#143

Post by MontyCarloHall »

flunhat wrote: post #37

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x). A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to b…

It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...

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

#144

Post by dafelst »

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.

Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.

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

#145

Post by rectang »

gregmac wrote: post #127
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,…

I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.

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

#147

Post by varenc »

donatj wrote: post #59

> 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.

Doesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.

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

#148

Post by SilverElfin »

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 think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability.

The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.

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

#149

Post by cmckn »

sqs wrote: post #141
cmckn wrote: post #129

I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812... In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.

It's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all around the world. You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board…

Sounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this headache.
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