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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

#721

Post by CoastalCoder »

raesene9 wrote: post #461

Slack 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...

> if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...

Is the concept of "full price" well-defined in this kind of situation?

I assumed price was always a matter of negotiation for enterprise-y sales. I'd think a "full price" would just be an attempt at anchoring by the vendor.

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

#722

Post by yeutterg »

It's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up.

My dream work chat app:

1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations

2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed

3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)

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

#723

Post by nirvdrum »

tschellenbach wrote: post #681
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.…

Happy to help, did you consider https://getstream.io/chat/ ? You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.

I’ve not heard of getstream. Is your service open source and all data easily extracted?

This post serves as a cautionary tale about how privately owned walled gardens, no matter how pretty, leave you in a precarious position. I suspect being in control of their data and having an open source escape hatch is what’s driving the adoption of Mattermost.

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

#724

Post by evanjrowley »

nicce wrote: post #717
xedrac wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soon owns part of TikTok. So do they own teens? Will teens be liability?

Brace yourself for the wave of paid teen influencers promoting Oracle.

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

#725

Post by bibstha »

n-exploit wrote: post #714
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.…

I have a key for https://once.com/campfire by 37Signals.com, which is an alternative to Slack, that I could offer in-kind to Hack Club - if desired. It's open source and you own your own data.

It's free now, they released it for free in most recent Railsconf.

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

#727

Post by mixcocam »

scrollaway wrote: post #359
mixcocam wrote: post #334

Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need). All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has…

This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else. You give zero thoughts as…

I'm sorry that you read my comment as "tone deaf". It was not my intention.

> This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”.

I don't see how a comment which proposes a solution to the problem at hand can be "selfish".

I am the owner of a small business myself and am well aware of what switching tools requires. I'm also sorry that you think that modern tools like Slack or Mattermost for that matter improve communication over what email provides; then again that is obviously a matter of opinion.

> “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.

The article is about a simple yet painful problem. I am proposing a solution, I don't see how my comment is not pertinent. As for my use of the word "just", simple does not mean easy.

> Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication. > > Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?

False dichotomy. I truly believe that mailing lists are a great way to collaborate. Especially given the case that data ownership is now even more important to the author of the post.

Slack/Mattermost try to combine real-time chat with asynchronous information exchange. I think that that is not a great way to work, this is close enough to what I think of these solutions to [link to](https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems). Not only that but your data will always be locked away in their non-standard format.

Moreover, I emailed the author (good thing this "clunky" system exists), and offered help with a potential switch to using email. Thank you nonetheless for taking my comment into consideration. I can only hope it was more useful for other readers than it was for you.

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

#729

Post by whstl »

btown wrote: post #670

One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them. And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they c…

Totally. I remember a few years ago where every open source or tech group community was on Slack. Today it's almost all Discord.

I once even went to a doctor and the staff was using Slack because it integrated with some calendar thing they had.

This is 100% gone.

Fancy startups are still using Slack but in two I worked at, they migrated to Teams or Google after a while, as soon as they were acquired.

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

#730

Post by OkayPhysicist »

yeutterg wrote: post #722

It's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up. My dream work chat app: 1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations 2. Crea…

You're overlooking a lot of the utility of DMs for things like "Hey dude, want to grab some lunch at 12:30?"
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