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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

#481

Post by nottorp »

chaboud wrote: post #257
dwedge wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them. They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff. I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absol…

That sounds quite a bit like fraud.

Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.

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

#482

Post by otherme123 »

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'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.

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

#486

Post by elphinstone »

linhns wrote: post #425
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.…

Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented. Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.

Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?

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

#487

Post by nickjj »

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.

Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.

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

#488

Post by serbuvlad »

I don't understand how "multi-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for the desktop" is such a small market with so few competitors while "single-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for mobile" is such a saturated market.

For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles.

For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs).

MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals.

And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.

I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.

So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.

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