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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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

#851

Post by seamanrob »

blueplanet200 wrote: post #791
seamanrob wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake. While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.

I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!

In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.

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

#852

Post by ToucanLoucan »

dhdresser wrote: post #838
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.…

Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing. Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible…

Hell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days."

Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe.

Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion.

Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?

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

#854

Post by milkshakes »

dhdresser wrote: post #838
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.…

Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing. Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible…

What was the oversight? How did you correct it?

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

#855

Post by wannabag »

I can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0]

I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.

[0] https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/

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

#856

Post by seamanrob »

solarkraft wrote: post #808
seamanrob wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

Thank you for responding and taking this on. > We're fixing it By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right? I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster. I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to…

As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.

This was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing while we work with them directly to ensure their workspace remains fully accessible. We will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.

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

#857

Post by [deleted] »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #673
BeefySwain wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository. https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

[deleted]

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

#858

Post by realityfactchex »

BeefySwain wrote: post #647
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

That's an outdated license web page dated 2024, see "Copyright © 2024" at the bottom.

The code was made free in 2025 per X post dated Sep 12, 2025 by Jason Fried [0], screenshot available [1].

A quote from Fried's tweet:

  Campfire...it's now 100% free...and open source.
Here's a quote from https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICE...

  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
  "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction...
[0] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png

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

#859

Post by p_l »

conductr wrote: post #626
p_l wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?

The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future

"We can change the terms at our discretion" is a line that gets the book thrown at you in court, at least in EU, and that's the start of the humiliation conga for whoever tries to claim such a clause.

You cannot insist on a clause that lets you change the contract at your discretion and having the resulting amended contract be valid without acceptance by the other party.

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

#860

Post by sadeshmukh »

matt-p wrote: post #391

Do you mind me asking if you'll be self hosting mattermost? If so they're moving to a 1000 User hard limit for self hosted instances. https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

There are plans to fork the repo at some point, since we do depend on lots of custom features eventually regardless (and nearly everything at HC is open source).
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