Live data from Hacker News

Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

mahadk.com

981–990 of 1001 posts

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

#981

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…

The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).

I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.

That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.

As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.

It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.

Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.

If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.

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

#982
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…

Why would you not be able to get notifications? I use various FOSS apps (and even Whatsapp) on GrapheneOS without Google Play services and notifications work just fine.

Botom line is that's how they want to earn money and it's not supported in their official apps without a subscription. I believe all the plumbing is in place but you have to build and maintain your own push sever intermediary and clients and push server.

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

#983
post #415
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.’

I have been following that project for a long time. They are "good people". They want to make sure the project survives. I am bummed about that change and I could probably get the their notification service free if i asked for it (little bit involvement with some things) but I didn't. I respect their decision. Though of course I do have the same concerns as you. I just want to think it won't happen.

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

#984
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…

Wait - this is the same Denise Dresser that led led some uber-high-pressure Salesforce enterprise sales teams in 2010s? Something tells me you aren’t really sorry

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

#985

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…

I don’t think many readers here will be taken in by this performative apology and believe it is anything other than it is: “We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention…

Honest question: is there any apology that you would have accepted?

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

#986
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…

> Thanks for holding us accountable.

Donation time - May I humbly suggest $195k. Accountability means there are no one way bets, when you stand to gain you stand to lose.

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

#988
post #886

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:.

Hi Rob, I'm Ian, CEO at Mattermost. Apologies for repeating the question from jrflowers, but I couldn't resist: >Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Mattermost is self-hosted and enables full data control. There's some organizations that want to move to Mattermost for various reasons. It's important for them to bring along their data. Wondering what your opinion might be?

cancelled our company's slack plan when all this news dropped. We're looking at Mattermost, the reviews are really good

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

#989
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…

yeh that's BS. you pushed your management to improve their numbers regardless of your human clients, they did it and now you're blaming it on them as a mistake due to the bad PR.

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

#990
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.…

they essentially tried to blackmail you into paying ASAP. while they tried to put it right because they got exposed I hope you continue with making plans for migration in the background.
Post reply on HN