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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

#641

Post by adamtulinius »

paulcole wrote: post #618
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.…

> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?

Then they lose their 11 years of history

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

#642

Post by abirch »

tyteen4a03 wrote: post #573
bombcar wrote: post #548

Earlier 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...

I hate microsoft, but I really hate slack.

Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.

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

#643

Post by NetMageSCW »

hliyan wrote: post #452
realityfactchex wrote: post #51

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or rep…

I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".

Perpetual licenses aren’t a panacea given that old software doesn’t have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of support is lacking.

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

#644

Post by freejazz »

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.…

[flagged]

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

#645

Post by giancarlostoro »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #555
actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

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.

They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.

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

#646

Post by kmacdough »

Aurornis wrote: post #619
tux3 wrote: post #352

That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory. If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack. This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.

Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored. I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m n…

Maybe, but theres a real benefit to getting your tool in the hands of ambitious kids if you want to sustain a market share once those kids grow older.

There's a reason Apple still gives pretty solid educational discounts even as the largest consumer hardware manufacturer.

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

#647

Post by BeefySwain »

realityfactchex wrote: post #51

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or rep…

Campfire is definitely not FOSS: https://once.com/license

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

#648

Post by inciampati »

serbuvlad wrote: post #488

I don't understand how "multi-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for the desktop" is such a small market with so few competitors while "single-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for mobile" is such a saturated market. For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Sessio…

matrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and truly federated.

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

#649

Post by driverdan »

linhns wrote: post #425
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.…

Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented. Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.

Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
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