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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

#61

Post by burkaman »

amarant wrote: post #50
kfogel wrote: post #14

So many stories like this about Slack. We use Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet. At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over. I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that n…

It is open source and you can self host it.

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

#62

Post by sweettea »

amarant wrote: post #50
kfogel wrote: post #14

So many stories like this about Slack. We use Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet. At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over. I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that n…

It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/

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

#63

Post by tomrod »

flunhat wrote: post #37

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x). A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to b…

I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.

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

#64

Post by artursapek »

randyrand wrote: post #40

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed…

Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing

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

#65

Post by tomrod »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned. Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud. For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.

$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.

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

#66

Post by notpushkin »

smelendez wrote: post #56
randyrand wrote: post #40

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed…

Makes some sense to me. In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction. And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local vo…

Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?

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

#67

Post by jppope »

I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough.

To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.

The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.

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

#68

Post by stevage »

greyface- wrote: post #21
rowanG077 wrote: post #3

I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.

Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009 with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B Salesforce acquisition.

Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.

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

#69

Post by cmckn »

armada651 wrote: post #30

> a pretty massive sum of money I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.

This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.

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

#70

Post by novatea »

Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
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