I'm curious about the choice of mattermost, which also looks like it's $10/user/month, not cheap! I guess they do have non-profit pricing for self-hosted. Curious if self-hosted mattermost is what Hack Club is looking at?
Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#603Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups. You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the…
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ... (Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...) For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well: In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." F…
>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash. I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#605Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element https://element.io/, I don't know why more people don't do this.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#608Mattermost is crippling their open-source edition and it gets worse every year. At the same time, it's difficult not to update, since the mobile app will require a new server version, and most regular users install and auto-update the mobile apps. It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.
In what way is it crippling? (I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)
Mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287107
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#609I 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.)
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status ( https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ ). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#610A reminder that the only thing worse than paying for software is renting cloud SaaS & ceding them all your data.
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back at some point before the entire world are vassals to the same 5-10 megacap US tech companies.