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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

#171

Post by novatea »

tomhow wrote: post #166

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 p…

Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.

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

#172

Post by galaxy_gas »

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…

The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's

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

#173

Post by novatea »

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.

There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.

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

#174

Post by tomhow »

novatea wrote: post #171
tomhow wrote: post #166

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 p…

Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.

Yes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we really don't know much at all.

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

#175

Post by SigmaEpsilonChi »

tomhow wrote: post #166

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 p…

I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.

The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).

I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.

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

#176

Post by casq »

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. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29

Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)

For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com

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

#177

Post by novatea »

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 Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.

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

#178

Post by 48terry »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #76
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?

The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagine…

Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!

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

#179

Post by tomhow »

SigmaEpsilonChi wrote: post #175
tomhow wrote: post #166

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 p…

I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them. The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore…

OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.

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

#180

Post by renewiltord »

realityfactchex wrote: post #140
renewiltord wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.

Yeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence, which is buried at the very end, after all the images. If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.

They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
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