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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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

#471

Post by actionfromafar »

safety1st wrote: post #433
actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter? I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism. The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the…

I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.

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

#472

Post by dmqctx »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #428
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.)

Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...

Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.

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

#473

Post by Dylan16807 »

lelanthran wrote: post #450
p_l wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?

We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause. Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar. I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document. The other…

> The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.

This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and they can migrate if it's truly necessary.

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

#475

Post by fdsfdsfdsaasd »

sd9 wrote: post #470
fdsfdsfdsaasd wrote: post #465

>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community. >However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history. >One could ar…

What details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.

Reading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication with Slack since then.

The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key element to this story, but that is glossed over.

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

#476

Post by mattlutze »

taegee wrote: post #417
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.…

If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw. We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.

Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.

And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.

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

#477

Post by SeanDav »

Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.

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

#478

Post by smartbit »

cskartikey wrote: post #423
taegee wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw. We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

this is what we're doing :)

Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?

  - Zulip
  - Matrix/Synapse and Element
  - Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits
See discussions below in this HN thread.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...

[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

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

#480

Post by cmckn »

raesene9 wrote: post #461

Slack seem to be doing this to a wide range of groups. The Kubernetes project and CNCF were told by Slack that they would lose access to the paid version with quite short notice. In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...

Funny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you have any references where I can read more? I didn’t hear about that
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