Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

mahadk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

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

#541

Post by davedx »

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.

Zulip is awesome too. On prem.

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

#543

Post by keithnz »

quietfox wrote: post #309
vjeux wrote: post #184

We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.

Let's revisit this assessment in a few years.

we've been using discord for years, it's great. Its model for making money is different, its primary market is gamers. Servers are content for their users to consume and they charge the users directly.

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

#545

Post by redserk »

dominicrose wrote: post #369
tossandthrow wrote: post #341

Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad. Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects. When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.

We've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more just cost or self-hostable. This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.

If you’re going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat conversations back into email, you might as well throw those summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..

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

#546

Post by raziel2p »

nickjj wrote: post #487
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.

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.

why the extra step of making them into PDFs?

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

#547

Post by dijit »

gschizas wrote: post #294
v3ss0n wrote: post #262

Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.

I set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try again though.

If you want help, I'm more than willing.

I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...

I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)

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

#548

Post by bombcar »

SeanDav wrote: post #477

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.

Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.

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

#549

Post by p-t »

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.

A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)

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

#550

Post by zelphirkalt »

enriquto wrote: post #289
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.)

> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids that's a perfect teaching occasion, then! Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!

Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...

Post reply on HN