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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

#921

Post by asnyder »

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…

There's also open-source solutions such as rocket.chat, Mattermost, and likely a few more I haven't played with.

I wish Mattermost wasn't always trying to nudge you out of community version, but otherwise pretty solid, better than Slack IMO. Is unfortunate they require weird gitlab spoof bypass to use SSO in community version. Shameful it's not out of the box.

Many years ago Pidgin with multi-channel IRC was all I needed, but seems Slack killed that whole party, which brings us to the current situation :(.

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

#923

Post by Braxton1980 »

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:.

Can you explain the nature of the mistake?

Like someone who didn't know or a change that they were lumped into?

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

#924

Post by sadeshmukh »

hk1337 wrote: post #718

That really sucks, I like Slack but for what you get isn't necessarily worth kicking up a fuss if they're going to increase the costs. I'm curious what they were actually getting for even the $5000/month and how many users there are? Going off the prices on Slack's homepage, for regular users to pay $200,000/year would mean they're working with ~900 users in a work group. I'm wondering if perhaps there's some automat…

We have 100,000 members, but only a fraction of that regularly active. As Hack is in our name, we have dozens of bots, workflows, and last I checked over 6000 channels administered by hundreds of users. Slack stats show almost 11 million messages in the past year.

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

#926

Post by tomnipotent »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #914
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:.

>> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones) > This was a mistake. Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward…

[flagged]

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

#927

Post by noisy_boy »

pythonatsea wrote: post #874

From Zach, founder of Hack Club: You all are amazing. Thank you so much to everyone who helped raise awareness and advocate for Hack Club. That wasn't the goal of my post yesterday (I mostly wanted to pre-empt #hackclub-leeks because I knew GitHub activity would show up :stuck_out_tongue:), but wow - you made a huge difference, especially @mahad's blog post that went viral. Thank you. I have some great news. @Christi…

> Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November!

Please don't enable this kind of company in their branding exercise. They just shit on your nonprofit and backpedalled only due to online outrage and you are rewarding their throwing a few pieces of silver to quiet things down by giving them a platform.

All this does is allow them to whitewash their greed and brainwash the next generation.

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

#928

Post by djtango »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #915
dhdresser wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue ... An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer: However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Sla…

Slack is a giant company at this stage. Is it so impossible to see that countless billing disputes both valid, invalid and injust happen multiple times a day without ever reaching senior teams because they have entire departments for that.

Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...

For as much as it could be Slack's culture to hold hostage your data, it can also be a slightly reckless sales rep looking to strong arm to meet their aggressive targets to save their own job.

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

#929

Post by linhns »

elphinstone wrote: post #486
linhns wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?

First time I heard this kind of thing for Slack, Heroku got instances before. I know both are owned by Salesforce, just want to make things clear.

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

#930

Post by blitzar »

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 wasn't a mistake, you got caught.
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