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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

#591

Post by prng2021 »

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.…

“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”

You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?

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

#592

Post by michabyte »

tedggh wrote: post #497

Where’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t the smartest people. I went through a similar drama with AWS a few years ago and after months of sleepless nights I decided to open a case with the office of the attorney general in my state. They were pretty quick to follow up m an…

Hi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.

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

#593

Post by ktosobcy »

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.…

Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?

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

#594

Post by hiatus »

anonbuddy wrote: post #578
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.…

is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?

Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?

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

#595

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#596

Post by whywhywhywhy »

dmqctx wrote: post #472
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.

Noshareholder would be more honest.

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

#597

Post by PunchyHamster »

sad that open protocols lost chat wars.

Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch of people clueless about average user's woes.

"let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server some things just outright not work!"

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

#598

Post by michabyte »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #571

Have you tried IRC?

Speaking as a member of Hack Club and a former summer intern of the same, we started on IRC if memory serves. The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium. Sure, a skilled power user can learn to work around its quirks in a few hours. However, a beginner to programming/complex computer skills with nothing aiding them but a passion for learning more would find it confusing enough that giving up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition, we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features (think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps answer your question :)

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

#599

Post by troyvit »

deeringc wrote: post #451
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 tee…

Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.

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

#600

Post by 1970-01-01 »

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.…

Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
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