Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
That is insane.
Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
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Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#632I 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!
Discord server it is! /s (but not really)
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
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™.
Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers. I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...
Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which you'd still recommend them?
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter? I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism. The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the…
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers. This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies look…
Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#635Slack seem to be doing this to a wide range of groups. The Kubernetes project and CNCF were told by Slack that they would lose access to the paid version with quite short notice. In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
OpenStreetMap Slack https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ was forced to downgraded to the free edition earlier this year for similar reasons.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#636[dead]
That sounds awful
(sorry to be unpleasant, but.. yeah.)
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#637Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance . This is very shortsighted.
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#638Seems like a good lesson. Don’t trust giant corporations. Use open source solutions. Build your own. It is one thing to be told it, it is another to experience it. Short term pain, long term gain.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#639That's so annoying, but all things considered, a universal blessing in disguise now that the team is moving to an open source solution.
Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.
Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
#640Hi, 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?
This is very well explained in the linked post.