Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by tossandthrow » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #467

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.

This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.

You are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before having gone through arbitration.

Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if you are dead.

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

#562

Post by gloosx » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.

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

#563

Post by loloquwowndueo » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #558

Aeolun wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?

I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.

Makes me filthy rich doesn’t imply I like it.

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

#564

Post by thrance » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

artk42 wrote: post #510

actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.

Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.

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

#565

Post by gosub100 » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

48terry wrote: post #432

pelagicAustral wrote: post #418

I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam... Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.

The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.

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

#566

Post by lillecarl » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

Not intended to pick on Hack Club, but I don't see why anyone with tech competency in-house would choose Slack, and if you don't you probably have MS Teams.

I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such.

Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.

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

#567

Post by _flux » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

Lapra wrote: post #434

Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...

Just IRC with

- a decent mobile client that uses the same account - and decent notification system - a backlog that survives disconnects - a search - file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also persist - markdown

But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.

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

#568

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

luckman212 wrote: post #490

actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?

I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.

But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...

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

#569

Post by bayindirh » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #536

Aeolun wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?

If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad. But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.

It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.

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

#570

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 11:58 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #548

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™.

A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams.

I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.

Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.