Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year • Hacker News Board

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

#701

Post by Corrado » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

joshgachnang wrote: post #589

stroebs wrote: post #232

Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.

Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.

We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.

The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".

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

#702

Post by 4b11b4 » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

thetridentguy wrote: post #308

jacinda wrote: post #287

+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic. Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...

I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.

It's better these day

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

#703

Post by throwmeaway222 » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

adamtulinius wrote: post #641

paulcole wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Probably worth it and possibly a great lesson for others.

Back in 2006 everything was self hosted, and chat was - everyone sharing each others AIM accounts around the room. Everything should probably go back to self hosting, including our servers.

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

#704

Post by dcrazy » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

gregw2 wrote: post #464

actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

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…

As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month

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

#705

Post by radlad » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

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.

Slack has always had a bottom-up sales funnel (i.e. the "land and expand" "shadow IT" model), so I'm not sure this is true.

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

#706

Post by kelvinjps » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #613

safety1st wrote: post #433

Earlier 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…

Yeah but the problem here is the short time alert

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

#707

Post by dcchambers » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

Maybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month:

- https://once.com/campfire

- https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.

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

#708

Post by throw457r32r » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:16 PM UTC

beAbU wrote: post #656

artk42 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.

You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.

You’re also allowed to say f_ck.

It’s the internet and you can decide what you want to type.

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

#709

Post by rplnt » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #289

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.)

> 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!

Slack used to allow you to connect your own clients using open standards. And then they suddenly didn't.

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

#710

Post by Fokamul » Thu, Sep 18, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #401

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

Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...

Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters". They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.

True whitehats are cucks, change my mind.