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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

#161

Post by margalabargala »

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.

What are your experienced differences?

Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.

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

#163

Post by belthesar »

varenc wrote: post #147
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.

This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

layman51 wrote: post #121

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…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by jacobr1 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #58
junar wrote: post #33

I really wish this post had more details. How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing? If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?

Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.

Almost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits. Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a standard playbook.

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

#166

Post by tomhow »

Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.

==

The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.

I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.

According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.

I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.

But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.

[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...

[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...

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

#167

Post by casq »

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.

Hi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of all the groups that we sponsor.

Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.

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

#168

Post by dbg31415 »

Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers!

https://www.discourse.org/

https://flarum.org/

https://www.simplemachines.org/

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

#170

Post by RajT88 »

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.

Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.

A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...

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