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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

#901

Post by pydry »

fasbiner wrote: post #797
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:.

It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit. Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who di…

>are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?

No answer means this.

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

#902

Post by sneak »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #409
sneak wrote: post #252

Note that Mattermost is fake open source cosplay, and keeps important features in their non-foss application. If you want these table stakes features (like SSO or message expiry) you’ll find yourself maintaining your own fork or janky scaffolding (I have cronjobs that run SQL directly against the db). They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their proprietary enterprise software product. It’s still…

Mattermost is fully licensed under AGPLv3 terms, and portions can be used under Apache 2 terms as well. I'm not sure why people would say they're not open source. It's true there's no community-led edition, but that's because no one has taken the initiative to create one yet.

Wrong. Mattermost is dual licensed with proprietary licenses, requiring a CLA to contribute.

Additionally another thing called Mattermost, made by the same people, isn’t open source at all, under any free software license.

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

#903

Post by crazygringo »

kragen wrote: post #774
tatsumaki19 wrote: post #677

I created an HN account solely to share this. A couple of years ago, our edutech company experienced a fourfold increase in Slack usage, was given weeks in notice too. We promptly transitioned to Google Chat (which we were paying for through Google Suite). Back then, Google Chat was quite inadequate, but I must admit that it now fulfills nearly 99% of the functions we used Slack for. Considering the numerous integrat…

Wow, Slack's customer service is worse than Google's? I've never seen such a harsh burn.

Google's paid Workspace customer service is fine.

All the complaints are around the free tier where customer service doesn't exist.

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

#904

Post by flare_blitz »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
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.…

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:.

> This was a mistake.

This looks extremely deliberate to me. Are you seriously suggesting that one of your sales reps accidentally demanded $250k from a bunch of teenagers?

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

#905

Post by joekim »

drewbitt wrote: post #869
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:.

I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.

The community here is very forgiving of software bugs, but why did the rep act that way? To paraphrase Warren Buffet, what are the incentives that directed that led to this outcome? Why did the rep in this case act so viciously?

If Hack Club did pony up the $200k the rep would probably be compensated in some way. That would increase the propensity of a rep to strong arm with short deadlines and hold their 11 year chat history hostage even if it’s not the appropriate pricing for a non-profit.

Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future. When it comes to the rep getting paid they’ll become an expert at how to do it properly.

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

#906

Post by FreakLegion »

quickthrowman wrote: post #900
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:.

It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity. Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure? This is such a transparent lie that…

It isn't two weeks until end of quarter. Like many businesses, Salesforce's fiscal calendar runs Feb 1 to Jan 31. Slack's did, too, before the acquisition. Q3 ends on Oct 31.

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

#907

Post by atherton94027 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #900
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:.

It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity. Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure? This is such a transparent lie that…

Exactly — anyone who has worked in sales for a New York minute knows that any six figures deal will have a human account manager assigned to it.

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

#908

Post by tabbott »

wltr wrote: post #415
dizhn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives…

Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’

Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...).

And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip having monetization for self-hosted business use? (Mobile notifications have always been free for most communities, and we have discount programs for various use cases detailed on our pricing page).

Look, in 2025, and one should be very wary of rugpulls. But Zulip has no venture investors. I've personally funded the project for almost a decade now, so that it can operate in line with our values (https://zulip.com/values/).

I want to use applications that are ethically managed, self-hostable, privacy-supporting, open-source, and excellent. Zulip aims to be that kind of project, and even with all the community contributions that we've fostered, I don't see how we could maintain Zulip responsibly without our professional team.

Should it be a red flag for an open-source application to have monetization that charges businesses for using services operated by its professional team? Or would the red flag be a project that lacks a professional team who one can count on to maintain it responsibly?

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

#909

Post by aagha »

fasbiner wrote: post #797
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:.

It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit. Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who di…

You're not going to hear back from @seamanrob. I guarantee it.

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

#910

Post by MarsIronPI »

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, this is meant to be a friendly question so apologies if it comes out wrong. Why does Hack Club coordinate over Slack? Wouldn't a free platform such as Matrix, Jabber or IRC be more in the spirit of an educational environment? Also, as I see it, wouldn't it be cheaper?
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