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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

#451

Post by deeringc »

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.)

It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.

1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.

2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.

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

#452

Post by hliyan »

realityfactchex wrote: post #51

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or rep…

I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".

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

#453

Post by jeremy46231 »

willvarfar wrote: post #218
p0w3n3d wrote: post #190

We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version). I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?

I get the sense that Mattermost is the same kind of eventually-get-you-paying play as Slack. Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free as well as Free open source.

We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!

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

#454

Post by adastra22 »

SadTrombone wrote: post #406
okcoder1 wrote: post #208

Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack. We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc. Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.

Not sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.

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

#455

Post by Simran-B »

novatea wrote: post #70

Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)

Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?

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

#457

Post by mihaaly »

ioulian wrote: post #230
realityfactchex wrote: post #51

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or rep…

> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.

> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation

I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.

Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.

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

#458

Post by cmsj »

lelanthran wrote: post #442
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.…

[flagged]

Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....

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

#459

Post by freetonik »

>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost.

I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough. Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.

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

#460

Post by amelius »

dotancohen wrote: post #404
actionfromafar wrote: post #401

Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance . This is very shortsighted.

Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.

Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.
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