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

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

#941

Post by rhetocj23 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 9:51 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #125

Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups. You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the…

"This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware"

This is basically it. Nobody frames it this way. But once you see it lol.. your eyes open up to what really goes on behind the scenes at Slack et al.

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

#942

Post by tototrains » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

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:.

No, this was a decision that had negative effects and it makes you look very, very bad.

But on the plus side you provided an excellent lesson to these teens and I'm sure they will consider the importance of trust, leverage, and incentives when dealing with other companies in the future.

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

#943

Post by dev_l1x_be » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

michabyte wrote: post #598

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #571

Have you tried IRC?

Speaking as a member of Hack Club and a former summer intern of the same, we started on IRC if memory serves. The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium. Sure, a skilled power user can learn to work around its quirks in a few hours. However, a beginner to programming/complex computer skills with nothing aiding them but a passion for learning more…

> The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium

I am not sure if I understand you. IRC = protocol, Tool = https://www.irccloud.com/.

Anyways, I hope you find a solution.

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

#944

Post by cyanydeez » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

Welcome to the new world order: everything is automated and "mistakes" are only corrected by special pleading.

Enjoy the veal, unless you were served chicken. In that casw, contact social media and hope someone cares.

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

#945

Post by CharlieDigital » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 10:53 AM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #766

whstl wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Fancy startups are still using Slack but in two I worked at, they migrated to Teams How do you fuck up so bad that you make people want to migrate to Teams

I recently had the opportunity to use Teams while working with a startup in legal tech where most customers are on Teams.

Honestly? Better than Slack, IMO, once you get used to how things are laid out.

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

#946

Post by Havoc » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

Agreed3750 wrote: post #759

According to the Slack HQ account on Reddit, the situation has been resolved: https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack... >We made a mistake. >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 value the work Hack Club does to inspire and…

Classic "I'm sorry we go caught"

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

#947

Post by Aachen » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

troyvit wrote: post #828

nixosbestos wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeesh. If I ranked chat platforms, Mattermost would barely be above Slack. It's pathetic that Discord runs circles around Mattermost, Slack, and Matrix for practical usability, features that make it possible to actually use with teams (not Teams). Mattermost still can't do follow System Theme, (and Slack requires you impersonating Chrome). Of course neither can Gmail. Salesforce and Google are such tiny companies…

Funny. Using Discord through Firefox I can't even copy links out of a conversation. Additionally, for some reason as of two weeks ago every time I click on a channel name it opens in a new tab. I'm not sure what that's running circles around, but I'm guessing not Mattermost.

The mobile app is also buggy as hell. Notifications of direct messages (when someone wants to reach you personally) work only sporadically whereas in group chats they're reliable. Then when you click one of those group ones, it opens the group chat, flashes you the message, then loads the rest of the history, scrolls you down, and marks the whole chat as read. I've eventually found that you can find it again by going out of the chat and to your in-app notifications and tapping it there again. Then iirc to reply, you need to click some "open in chat" option (while you're already literally viewing the chat) and then it seems to scroll and show you the message correctly. Or maybe that latter thing was from search results, idk

I'm also pretty sure it silently deletes old direct message chats. I'm missing some that I really thought existed. Don't fault them for deleting things btw, seeing all the (literal and figurative) shit that thousands of teenagers post in this server I was helping out on, but it shouldn't be silent

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

#948

Post by bogzz » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

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:.

[flagged]

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

#949

Post by Aachen » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

Firefishy wrote: post #635

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...

OpenStreetMap Slack https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ was forced to downgraded to the free edition earlier this year for similar reasons.

Join us on Signal or one of the many other options: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels#Realtim...

I've never understood why a part of our community goes with this walled garden to host their chat. We're literally an open data project

Edit: fwiw, I know that moving communities is extremely hard, not to say impossible to achieve completely intact, but those who care could choose to join two chat systems. Eventually, the one people gravitate towards will win. E.g. I'm still in the Telegram chats and use those on occasion (also because, as a moderator, I get regular pings), but primarily share content on Signal or Matrix

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

#950

Post by p-t » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

daedrdev wrote: post #824

I get that you want to not rely on third parties like slack, but why not discord? Teens overwhelmingly have it and already use it, which should count for something, right?

[i'm a hack club community member] the slack has thousands of channels and tens of thousands of emojis. also, there are a lot of private channels. from my understanding that's not really possible in discord. also, hack club was started before discord was created.