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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

#991

Post by didntknowyou »

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:.

so you couldn't respond to your client but had enought time to make an account and post here because of the blowback?

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

#992

Post by didntknowyou »

dakial1 wrote: post #862
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:.

Great you are owning the mistake and fixing it. May I suggest a public post mortem so that the doubters can see that you went after the root cause? Might be interesting for HN as well as big companies have mistakes in policy, teams and automated collections...

zero owning of the mistake. calling it an 'oversight' with no real apologies is just a brush off

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

#993

Post by omnee »

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…

I find it hard to believe such an underhanded policy was not approved by senior staff members. Clearly, the negative feedback has forced Slack to change course, but that such a policy was allowed in the first place will be held against Slack by any reasonable person for the foreseeable future.

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

#994

Post by Ylpertnodi »

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…

Wow! You still trust them?

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

#995

Post by roncesvalles »

abtinf wrote: post #892
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…

FWIW, in case you are not familiar with this forum: a 2700 point story is kind of a big deal, on par with the announcement of GPT-5 (only ~2k points). The damage to your brand is immense . It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.

I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.

Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.

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

#996

Post by jama211 »

milkshakes wrote: post #854
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…

What was the oversight? How did you correct it?

They won’t answer, because they’re not interested in actually being accountable.

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

#997

Post by jama211 »

dman wrote: post #827
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:.

Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?

I doubt it

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

#998

Post by jama211 »

dwedge wrote: post #222
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…

I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them. They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff. I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absol…

Oh so there’s a history of dark patterns too? Colour me surprised.

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

#999

Post by jama211 »

This is entirely slack’s fault and this is awful and I do NOT give this advice with any intent to blame the victim, but in future information critical to your company or even just useful such as guides or documentation or anything are things you should store outside of slack or other saas. Even if they don’t rug pull you, they could go bankrupt as a company and shut down or something. You should always have a backup.

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

#1000

Post by jama211 »

s_dev wrote: post #939
Charmunk wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack club was offered 5 years of Enterprise+ to make up for the situation, and has decided not to migrate at this time

I have no sympathy for Hack Club if they're caught out by this again and in 6 months Slack decide to revert back to the price increase when all the social media focus has died down.

They didn’t say they wouldn’t migrate docs etc to another solution, if I were them I’d keep it for chat only but with the attitude that if it’s burned at any moment then that’s fine, anything important is backed up or no longer there.
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