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. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29
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)
For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com
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 and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again.
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 this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.
> 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 Slack workspace and
delete all of our message history.
> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.
The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.
The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.
This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.
Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?
Hell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days."
Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe.
Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion.
Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?
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).
This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.
I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.
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.
Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota
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
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.
(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
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.
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 didn't go viral?
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 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.
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
>> 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 is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
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 I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.
Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.
Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.
I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
Definitely like to judge folks based on how they fix (systemically!) problems. That said, did any kids in the club voice concerns about staying with an organization which had such a [potentially] severe incident?
I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.
That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.
Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.
And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.
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?
They're shaking everyone down, it's been going on for years. They want huge sums of money to maintain chat history. I'm watching orgs left and right move to teams, not because it's better in anyway, but because it's basically free.
"This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.
i posted a comment saying as much but deleted it. I had a client 8-9 years ago where Salesforce showed up with a bill in the millions and said "pay up or your org/instance and all your data is gone". "Shakedown" is exactly how the client described it.
We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.
Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.
I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.
In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.
On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away.
I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?
Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
> Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29.
Last year Salesforce launched Agentforce and gave everyone a free year. Dreamforce is coming up next month, I wonder how many companies are going to find themselves in a similar situation to yours...
This makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them to another piece of software.
>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
While I don't use slack and am barely familiar with its functionality, this stuck out just as an example of how important it is to export and save backups of anything you do with a third-party platform that your business completely depends on. That by itself is dangerous but at least saving all those DMs and channel content would have been a good idea.
As far as I understand, there are apps that let you do this. 11 years is a lot to lose.
Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?
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?
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.
Glad it got resolved, if this isn’t an excellent reason to get off slack and a perfect illustration sd to why owning your data matters then I don’t know what is.
I hear mattermost is a good alternative and you can self host it.
Good luck, I’m sure teaching teens to code as a nonprofit is hard work enough, I can’t imagine worrying about losing 11 years worth of messsges on top of it.
“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”
You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?
I’ve not heard of getstream. Is your service open source and all data easily extracted?
This post serves as a cautionary tale about how privately owned walled gardens, no matter how pretty, leave you in a precarious position. I suspect being in control of their data and having an open source escape hatch is what’s driving the adoption of Mattermost.
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 nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
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 absolutely do not use their AI
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).
Thank you for the correction! I meant to type "the pricing where the buyer's remaining profit is exactly zero", and I'm not sure whether I accidentally deleted some text or what. I was pretty tired.
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to "difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll understand their intended meaning.
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.
People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
I believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
That's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters".
They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
[0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS)
[1] https://zulip.com
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation
I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.
Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
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 exist.
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.
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.’
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)
I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction...
Slack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways.
(- a hack club member)
I think it would be silly to not proceed with the migration, although hopefully there's less stress to do it quickly. Slack has shown they can't be trusted.
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.
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 though, so I sympathize.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
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.
I’m more disgusted by the alleged humans at Slack when they inevitably reverse their decision like this and choose to lie about being incompetent over admitting to being malicious.
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...
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
> if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
Is the concept of "full price" well-defined in this kind of situation?
I assumed price was always a matter of negotiation for enterprise-y sales. I'd think a "full price" would just be an attempt at anchoring by the vendor.
That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory.
If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.
It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.
Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.
Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.
People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)
A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now.
It really hasn’t required any maintenance at all beyond incrementing the version number.
They are starting to tighten the screws (showing admins a warning if you have over 2500 users), but it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.
One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them.
And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator program.
But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of customers.
Yeah, I started somewhere around 6-7 Slack communities. I use exactly zero of them anymore. I still feel guilty for roping multiple communities into the service and helping multiple group of people have somewhere to hang out, only for the rug to get pulled out from under all of us.
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
When was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.
Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.
Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.
I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.
I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.
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 integrations with Google Suite products, it might even exceed 100% now. However, Google Suite promptly raised its prices when they integrated Gemini. Nevertheless, the Google account manager provided us with significantly more advanced notice and a substantial discount.
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
Moving from one proprietary app to the next isn't a solution. No matter which commercial service you choose, there will be an attempt to squeeze more profits out of you sooner or later and you will have to pay up or lose your data.
The lesson here is that proprietary software is for suckers. Bite the bullet and move to an open protocol with FOSS clients.
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. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.
She was incredibly apologetic for putting Hack Clubbers in this position and very generously offered to donate Slack Enterprise+ to Hack Club with a 5 year commitment. We think this is the best option, so we're going to move forward. Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November!
We hope this will be a great start to a renewed relationship as Hack Club has benefited tremendously from Slack's 11 year partnership. We're very grateful.
This means that all of Hack Club's history and bots will be preserved. Additionally, it will open up the path for a special Hack Club OAuth login flow to reduce friction for new Hack Clubbers and APIs to build better moderation tools.
Thank you to the enormous outpouring of support. There have been so many kind messages, emails, and even alumni from years ago reaching out. It's meant the world as we've navigated this difficult situation. @here
> 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.
It's good to hear the situation is no longer being handled in a cold, hard-deadline kind of way.
But, what would have happened to a smaller group without the ability to get this viral support and attention? Most of us in a similar situation would have struggled to get attention on the matter.
As happy as I am to see this being handled better, it was a stark reminder that self-hosting is sometimes worth the trouble.
Hack Club may well recover from this, but they will never get back the time, energy, and focus they put into a problem that should never have happened.
Similarly, I doubt anything Slack could do at this point could convince me to trust them not to rug-pull me in future.
Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack.
We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc.
Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
>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 educate young people in coding and technology, and we regret the concern this situation has caused. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
Slack cannot unilaterally “resolve” this situation, and their proposed solution doesn’t seem to address the concerns that were raised in the first place.
Yes it does. They don’t have to pay $200k/yr + $50k immediately, and don’t have to spend the time, effort, and money on self-hosting and migrating away.
Seems like they've gone past even their own '1000' users. In v11 it's a cap of 250 users! They're also rapidly removing features for team too.
- User limits were lowered to final threshold of 250 for Mattermost Team Edition
- GitLab SSO has been deprecated from Team Edition.
- Playbooks has stopped working for Team Edition.
I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
What's happening on the hosted side of things? Ah;
- Introduced support for Mattermost Entry Edition with message history limits.
Yes, I mean they are not difficult to remove, but I think it would be fair to add the context that they're going to have to fork it. E.g open source is not a panacea either, they will likely also struggle with postgres being a bottleneck for that number of users (particularly on search), the redis integration is not part of open core.
There are plans to fork the repo at some point, since we do depend on lots of custom features eventually regardless (and nearly everything at HC is open source).
My first thought was had this moved the stock price - but the day price is up. The 5Y price is back to where it was ... over all they're still 6000% up.
S&P 500 up 3x in 5Y so back to same level isn’t great
I guess stock price is a reflection of crap management which in return leads to these behaviours. Maybe I should check the stock price first before deciding on a product.
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.
So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!
At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.
With moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if desired).
I don’t think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer how sticky are these products.
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.
they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course
Mattermost is crippling their open-source edition and it gets worse every year. At the same time, it's difficult not to update, since the mobile app will require a new server version, and most regular users install and auto-update the mobile apps.
It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.
How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing?
If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!
Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.
Almost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits. Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a standard playbook.
What I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more interesting to me than a story with fewer ones.
They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
Based on California’s Automatic Renewal Law and contract principles, what you’ve described raises serious concerns:
In California, companies must provide clear written notice of any material change to renewal terms and obtain consent before billing under new terms. Changing pricing from a staff-only basis to billing every user—without a new contract or notice—appears inconsistent with that law.
Telling you to ignore invoices, then demanding immediate payment with a threat of total service shutoff, could be construed as coercive and in bad faith.
Recommendations:
Put everything in writing. Send Salesforce/Slack a formal letter citing Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17600–17606 (Automatic Renewal Law) and demanding they extend service during resolution.
Request a 90-day transition period to migrate, framed as reasonable and legally necessary under consumer protection standards.
Escalate to Salesforce legal/compliance. If necessary, copy the California Attorney General’s consumer protection unit.
Preserve evidence. Save all communications, invoices, and contract copies.
This doesn’t mean you should stop negotiating, but you have a strong basis to demand more time and push back on the sudden payment demand.
Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad.
Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.
When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.
We've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more just cost or self-hostable.
This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.
If you’re going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat conversations back into email, you might as well throw those summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..
You are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before having gone through arbitration.
Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if you are dead.
Where’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t the smartest people. I went through a similar drama with AWS a few years ago and after months of sleepless nights I decided to open a case with the office of the attorney general in my state. They were pretty quick to follow up m and contacted AWS directly. My case was resolved a few days after that.
Hi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.
>It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law.
Under what principle? They were near the end of their contract, so there's no legs to stand on. It's not like there's rent controls for SaaS contracts.
I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough.
To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.
The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.
I genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and getting nothing.
Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
Maybe they were running the math expecting that the customer would bail before the year renewal, but would pay the short term extortion to migrate their data.
$50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business
If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy
It's a sign of a really poor decision making process.
They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in their workplace.
Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front of those students.
See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling/documentation.
They're not an independent business, their pricing is probably decided by Salesforce. It's probably bundled in free for Salesforce customers who buy a minimum of X seats.
Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.
We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.
The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".
Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable
We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version).
I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?
We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should stop falling for it.
Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.
I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances.
You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team?
Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux, which is why I use it.
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately.
I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.
I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.
And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.
And so on.
We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).
I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).
Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.
I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have time to experiment with it.
So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in this article
Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer communication.
Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.
No channels either.
Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how good the clients are though.
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).
A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.
It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.
I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?
Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.
Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.
Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.
I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.
It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.
I’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others.
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work.
I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
Seems like a good lesson. Don’t trust giant corporations. Use open source solutions. Build your own. It is one thing to be told it, it is another to experience it. Short term pain, long term gain.
Since no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way to dump Slack: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?
Sorry, you specifically mentioned "these dumps". I don't know about "those" dumps. Mattermost and Element can import everything from Slack, but it might require following their instructions.
This is a nightmare of a PR for Salesforce / slack. I guess someone did not do their due diligence before reaching out and informing you about the price hike.
I wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone felt very proud of having automated this important, but often neglected part of their business model.
> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.
Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though.
Meanwhile, did a bit of a test drive in my org with Mattermost, devs were mostly okay with it, but it was decided from top down to go with Teams instead. Wonder how that will work out in the next decade.
It's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up.
My dream work chat app:
1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations
2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed
3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)
This is close to a lot of what's happening at Glue. Threads are first-class, so you can start a thread within a group - let's talk about our GraphQL schema and that thread should live in the API Development group. You can also start a thread without a group - just me and another 2 coworkers need to discuss a specific point that would be noisy for everybody else.
Glue AI can be invoked at any time in any context and you can choose whether or not you want to share your conversation with other people after the fact. MCP is also well supported so you get good integration with lots of services like Linear or Notion.
The agent isn't quite as proactive as updating documentation without being prompted right now, but it's regularly done by telling Glue AI to update pages in Notion with info from a thread.
I am a founder of one company and work in sales. Here's where I'm coming from:
As a founder, if everyone is always DMing you, the knowledge is not shared with the team. You become the bottleneck for everything.
In sales, you end up having the #account-[customer] thread and about 4 or 5 DM groups with different internal people on them for each account. Lots of time bringing everyone up to speed when it could be more unified.
Sure, there are sensitive issues like employee conflict, salary discussions, etc. I'm not saying everything needs to be in the public. But I think DMs as they work in Slack cause more issues than they solve.
I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough. Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.
If there's one good thing to say about Microsoft (not about Teams), it's that they strive to keep good business relationships with their clients, including backwards compatibility. I don't think I've ever heard of a story like this about Microsoft.
That is true, but perhaps part of the lesson is you can’t count on that staying the same as executives change and companies get new goals, such as stock price.
Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers!
I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...
I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.
We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
> 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 Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
Oh, 7 days to cough up $50k, cool. Slack enters my list of companies I will never do business with and actively dissuade everyone else from doing so.
- a decent mobile client that uses the same account
- and decent notification system
- a backlog that survives disconnects
- a search
- file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also persist
- markdown
But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.
For those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl).
Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.
The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open.
For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile
I can’t really comment on video calls in Matrix since I never used them in Slack either. For me the main draw is having one tool that does one job well, rather than trying to be the all-in-one hub for everything. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s actually good at that, instead of relying on a centralized system that tries to cover all bases but ends up being mediocre at most of them.
I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads. Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy. The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for me.
Are you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?)
(Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you give the app total permission to run in the background they should work.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.
If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.
Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people
would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
I was using element X. I can re-install the stack and see if things have improved. If you want someone to debug with I'll gladly hop on a call to see if I'm doing something wrong. The jist of my setup was postgres, coturn, element web and synapse with traefik in front of it exposed to the web in a docker compose
I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.
It's also not a coincidence that Slack is neutering the ability to access channel history via the API very soon. With a very generous rate limit of 2 requests per minute I believe it was and a max of ~10 messages. This is already enforced for new marketplace apps and will apply to all apps starting in March according to their docs.
Slack claims to be data processor, not data controller [0]. The workspace admins are, ironically, considered by slack to be data controllers, so GDPR-related requests are supposed to be handled by them.
This is ironic though, as in the Pro plan they do not offer options to admins to download everything (eg DMs). So as an EU citizen I cannot request all my data, but technically it is the data controller who is responsible for it here (my workspace admin). Not sure how that would fly if somebody took the effort to seriously look into it though.
Also not sure how easy it is for an admin to download and provide me even my data from the public channels in the first place with the current tools. I am pretty sure there is no GDPR compliance overall, but it is probably not trivial to get slack actually accountable for it.
PS It seems the workspace owner has to contact slack about it, and this is for both free and pro plan where downloading direct messages/private channels is not an option by default. [1]
> In general, Customer is the controller of Customer Data. In general, Slack is the processor of Customer Data and the controller of Other Information.
It does to some extent, because companies have to respect gdpr for their own users as well: so individual employees/slack users have gdpr rights and they individually can get those enforced against the slack operators.
Unpopular opinion: I think it's wild that ANY ORG would pay $200k for a chat app.
If I ever ran an org that needed a chat app and the costs came even close to $200k a year, I would rather hire an engineer, contract a designer, and create our own, or more likely, contribute/fork an open source project like Matrix; providing us with the ability to *really* integrate it into our company/tools - as oppose spending it on IRC+ for "good enough" integration. PLUS ... our data stays on under our control.
I would say and non-profit. For a larger company like, idk, AT&T or IBM or Goldman and Sachs, $200k/yr would be cheap to handle all of the internal chat.
We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too
It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.
I have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very responsive as backend support.
I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.
IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available.
I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
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 automation that is kicking in when it shouldn't be?
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.
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 better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
Mattermost is open source, but the licensing is complex and full of bullshit. It is not a community driven project. Once you have installed the self hosted solution, you get a user interface that asks you to upgrade to the enterprise edition in every corner and menu.
A self hosted version is better than nothing though.
I switched from Slack to Discord back in 2017 and I can't imagine ever going back. Their free offering is better than what you get for $$$$ from Slack.
Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers far more granular controls.
They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.
I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam...
You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.
This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.
The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.
Honestly, I did not know Salesforce had bought Slack. I would encourage everyone here to avoid that company - their business model seems to be create a spiderweb of critical touch points within an organisation and its data then suddenly hike prices. Certainly in this case but I’ve heard it happen with other products too.
It's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all around the world.
You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)
Hi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of all the groups that we sponsor.
Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.
It was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and there was a special contract drawn with HC (that's the 5000/yr mentioned in the original post).
Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year
If you are going the way to self-host it
so you own all your won data.
all you have to do is run mattermost
in production on hardware you control
at 99.9% Or 80% or whatever uptime
is deemed necessary.
Or you can use an out of the box
host, but then your data is
not in your direct control.
Frankly, not having an alternative identified for all hosted corporate services and maybe even at the ready with regularly maintained deployment and transition plans is and long has been reckless at this point.
Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion.
Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
That seems an unreasonable bar for all services. Even if you have identified say, Gogs to replace your Github instance, there are so many practical realities of porting a large installation that your simulacra instance is offering nothing.
I can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0]
I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.
Well, that's a good case study for teens who are learning and are going to join this industry.
If you rent instead of owning, you can be rugpulled at any moment. And then your only hope is getting viral on Reddit/HN/other places.
As long as consumer protection is an afterthought companies will continue to change their agreements after purchase and screw over consumers.
I'm left to wonder why do we even use words anymore, when tipping isn't optional, when purchasing doesn't mean you own the thing you buy, and an agreement can be changed without notice.
Why is it called tip and not fee. Why is it called purchase and not rent. Why is it called agreement and not... well I don't even know what to call that... a pinky promise?
We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation.
we built a tool on slack for communities and companies, and then did some outreach to community leaders about trying it out. they almost universally said that they hated being captive to slack and wanted to transition away.
We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.
we've been using discord for years, it's great. Its model for making money is different, its primary market is gamers. Servers are content for their users to consume and they charge the users directly.
As someone who helps run another volunteer tech nonprofit that relies on slack, is there a reason they kicked you off the free nonprofit plan? Asking to have a good backup plan for our community.
If we donate to Hack Club, can we put a stipulation that it's not used to pay the Salesforce ransom? :) But I see that they're reversing course, which is good at least.
Seriously though, I'm not sure how I've never heard of Hack Club before. I love the cause and wish I had such a thing when I was younger. Hopefully they see an uptick in donations with all the fellow techies reading your post!
My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.
The problem with these companies is that they suffer from the equivalent of golden handcuffs. They already have customers paying through the nose for overpriced products. It is very hard, psychologically, to admit you cannot charge the same amount anymore. And if you make a change you have to reduce the price for existing customers as well.
Most companies with these models will die simply because they won't have the courage and long term thinking to do this.
Out of curiosity, what's keeping you in slack ecosystem? Why not leverage Discord and run on your own server? Wouldn't that be a much economical alternative to begin with?
It's super simple to build with Stream and far lower costs than Slack. (i'm the CEO, founder so don't take my word for it). But we have quite a few customers building either communities into their app or large companies running integrated chat workflows. (think airline operations, construction collaboration etc.)
I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.
It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.
Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.
Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.
You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.
Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).
But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.
Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar.
Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk.
It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange.
It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
I think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability.
The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.
Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business.
If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.
I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.
But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.
I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.
I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high. Someone then has to say "no".
Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)
I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
Slack is based upon IRC. IRC is a free and open chat protocol that anybody can easily self host on the oldest hardware.
IRC is command driven and scary. Terrifying.
That people would pay thousands of dollars a year for vendor lock-in and that will abuse their privacy for a visually pleasing alternative is a quite a business model. It’s like targeting people with a history of abuse because you know they are exploitable and will eagerly fulfill your desires.
We need a blacklist of vendors that subject clients to extortion. As per user reports, two such vendors are Cloudflare and now Slack. These are to be avoided at all costs.
We figured out a decade ago or so that Slack was entirely unsustainable for any kind of community type usage. Glad to see that more people are coming to that realization.
A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst.
But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.
The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?
IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.
I think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just "tricked" into thinking this.
Slack is easily the worst platform I can think of using for something like this. Why would you not be using discord instead? You know, the free platform that every teenager is already using? You could archive your messages using any number of bots.
Slack is fundamentally wrong for this kind of thing. Every time I find out the support channels for anything is a slack server, I groan. The whole workspace setup is awful.
but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway
developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one
it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
Last year Hostgator suddenly changed the conditions of my plan without any warning at a renewal time so I "conveniently" went over the storage quota, then shut me down. I had to pay the extortion fee to restore service. Needless to say, I'll be moving before the next renewal.
For changes of this size, to any client, grace and care is the well trodden path. The only case where this isn't the route is when you don't want that customer, or where you can no longer afford that customer. Does it seem like the cost of AI on everything is coming home to roost?
"[..] With that being said though, this ordeal has made us think more deeply about entrusting data with external SaaSes and ensuring that we own our data is definitely going to be a very big priority going forward. I’d encourage you to think the same way! [..]"
>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack
So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency
saas are really owning themselves by pulling crap like this.
I work in education sector, over the last year or so multiple saas providers have pulled this, we've inevitably gone in house, self hosted, open source. Saved tonnes of money and have bought skills back in house.
Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:
"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."
So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.
I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.
I'm curious about the choice of mattermost, which also looks like it's $10/user/month, not cheap! I guess they do have non-profit pricing for self-hosted. Curious if self-hosted mattermost is what Hack Club is looking at?
I have never been able to understand the Slack fetish most tech people have. IMO MS Teams is feature-wise better in most cases. Especially functionality for formatting posts is far better in Teams.
"Hi Stewart Butterfield here, I cofounded Slack and I'm sorry about this. We're taking steps to fix this from happening again and Skyfall will have free Slack for life"
I pay about $90/month for a small company I own. I've been thinking about moving off Slack, but this is a good push over the edge. I am going to migrate over to once.com/campfire.
Monopoly is the biggest problem of our generation. I hope a side effect of AI coding is that enough people create alternative tech to replace tech monopolies products. But that is a long shot.
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.
Question must be asked: why would anyone teach teenagers coding these days?
People naturally love coding, especially teens. It's addictive. And it no longer leads to any career prospects, or chances to contribute to society, or money, or anything really. It's over as a mass occupation. Addicting teens to it does them a bad service. In the future, personality traits that will lead to happiness and success will be opposite to those nurtured by coding, or are typical among professional coders: empathy, likability, social skills... Kids who got hooked on coding now, are heading for a life of misery.
Man, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.
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, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles.
For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs).
MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals.
And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.
I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.
So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.
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 :(.
matrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and truly federated.
IRC would not be useful for Hack Club as it's only text. Hack Club requires software that allows us to upload images, create canvases and most importantly, call with others.
What "years of institutional knowledge" does Hack Club and others have in Slack? I assume anything more than a week old to be unsearchable. In fact I want chats older than 1 week to be deleted so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
my favorite part of joining a new team is reading old merge requests and tickets that have a summary of "the reason is based this slack conversation" and then have a link to a slack conversation from a year ago... in an org that deletes slack chats older than 1 year.
We extensively use Canvases, as well as pinned messages and message links to reference others. As in, I often need to look at older messages, very occasionally years old, but usually within the month.
>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community.
>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 Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
>One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more.
This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
Reading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication with Slack since then.
The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key element to this story, but that is glossed over.
We're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't lose it (Google drive mainly).
And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.
Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
> And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution
It's uh... not good? I have one client that uses it, and it's just painful. Threading doesn't work well, notifications are hard to configure, rich text entry is subtly broken...
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.
I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!
It's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can afford it (or borrow it).
I'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
You could pay for 200-300 MS Teams seats for a decade with that kind of money pile, or a F100-sized Oracle database instance.
I went through the whole slack->mattermost pipeline a very long time ago to avoid (at the time) Skype for business and the initial rollout of Teams.
It turns out we wasted a lot of time trying to be clever and not pay the devil for his services. Unfortunately, there are some proprietors in the space who occasionally make the devil look like a saint. I'd rather do business with him than return a call to a "at least it's not you-know-who" company that fucked me this hard. The devil is brutal but not this brutal. Larry Ellison would at least have his sales people buy me a fancy steak dinner first.
Slack is doing questinonable things anyways. When we migrated away from it to Teams, I wanted to export the workspace to be able to look stuff up in case we need it. We are a very small company and had the smallest plan, no chance, export only with the expensive plan.
Since I'm located in europe, I thought of just doing a data request based on GDPR (at least for my messages). They declined it and referred me to my organization, since we are in charge of fulfilling such requests (how would we even do that if there's no functionality for it?). Absolutely ridiculous.
Not open either, so that'll go the same way in the end. People will want more money no? Or get bought and then the buyers want more money... Pick something open and self hosted OR that at least allows you to move everything and tinker with it yourself when (not if) the company becomes evilll.
Dumb question maybe. Can the users in Europe raise a GDPR request to extract all their data from Slack? I realise it's not easy to port the data to other platforms yet, but atleast you have a copy of the data
No sane person should pay even those $5k a year for a STUPID CHAT APP!!!
It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own shit for $5 a month, FFS!
Does this really surprise anyone. In the current en$hitification environment? The second saleforce bought slack it was dead to me. I've only got 1 workspace left on it.
Hey, I'm Rob, CPO at Slack. This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along <3.
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 would find it confusing enough that giving up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition, we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features (think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps answer your question :)
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
Doesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.
This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You're still free to connect a logging bot.
The sibling comment talks about IRCv3 features that show a limited amount of context from immediately before you joined, which is not the same as the infinite history seen in Slack and Discord.
Slack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.
I am fairly indifferent to Slack - I have to use it for work.
But our experiences seem so vastly different:
- UI is, with the exception of large media, snappy and pretty native feeling
- no jumps (that I can recall)
The mobile app is okayish though its offline indication and notifications are a bit frustrating.
Not sure if it might be related to specific instances, i.e. large organizations with hundreds of channels, etc like in my case... still, my workstation is pretty beefy, threadripper pro 7985wx, 256GB RAM, RTX 4080 (and this is no software issue, as other, much more resource intensive apps run just fine)... though slack is unmistakably sluggish, to the point of me being frustrated enough with it to complain about it here :)
What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.
I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.
If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email.
I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).
I spend around 30%, if not more of my work time on Slack (collaborating with others, solving customer issues, searching, documenting)
I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like (Teams, IRC etc)
As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best keyboard etc
Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is "best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of communication tools I think the difference is huge.
Is this needed to do my work? nope
It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes
People with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a company, and I find it not great if people complain about such minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks, frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.
Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.
==
The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.
I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.
According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.
I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.
But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.
Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.
Yes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we really don't know much at all.
I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.
The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).
I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009 with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B Salesforce acquisition.
It’s not even really just large companies, even though the extortion, predation, and vulture tactics tend to be rolled out once market capture and network effect has been achieved, which tends to correlate with being larger companies.
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
I’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale.
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book _Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book, but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses, and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating their niche with razor focus.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
I feel like any time a company goes public they lose the ability to pass up on revenue. The C-suite report to the board, who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits.
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
It did happen, at least from the perspective of a one year member. We had zero warning, and even core staff were caught off guard. Our migration basically began now.
I agree. If this was Oracle I might not have too difficult of a time believing this is all of the story. But I do think in this case there is more to the story.
I am willing to believe these things do happen. Different vendor, but I have experienced a price jumping 3x with one month notice before the annual renewal.
And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.
Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy for the situation
Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy for the situation
Trying to figure out if this was the result of the sheer exhilaration of smashing the post button or a humiliation kink where you want people to yell at you
Pissing off community with the word "hack" consisting of thousands of students with lots of free time to spare. I hope nothing will go wrong for salesforce after this move
Hack in this context is the software development one, i.e. 'hacking on a project' meaning working on a project. You are thinking of the cybersecurity one.
I pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don't need to be "cutting edge" all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.
There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?
I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.
> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.
Well now I'm convinced that this confusion is the root of the billing issue. Is there not a way that the clients (i.e. the students they are helping) could be added as some kind of "customer" instead of an "internal employee". If not, then yes I could see why it would be expensive.
>maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?
I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.
Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.
They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.
Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.
Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.
I had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using Teams was a daily battle.
Chat? No. But the strength of Teams is that it lets you do everything else you want in an integrated communications app - voice, video calls, calendars, viewing (and editing) documents, etc. At a reasonable price that Microsoft isn't going to crank to the moon.
Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need).
All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience is.
Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.
Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
I'm sorry that you read my comment as "tone deaf". It was not my intention.
> This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”.
I don't see how a comment which proposes a solution to the problem at hand can be "selfish".
I am the owner of a small business myself and am well aware of what switching tools requires. I'm also sorry that you think that modern tools like Slack or Mattermost for that matter improve communication over what email provides; then again that is obviously a matter of opinion.
> “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
The article is about a simple yet painful problem. I am proposing a solution, I don't see how my comment is not pertinent. As for my use of the word "just", simple does not mean easy.
> Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.
>
> Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
False dichotomy. I truly believe that mailing lists are a great way to collaborate. Especially given the case that data ownership is now even more important to the author of the post.
Slack/Mattermost try to combine real-time chat with asynchronous information exchange. I think that that is not a great way to work, this is close enough to what I think of these solutions to [link to](https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems). Not only that but your data will always be locked away in their non-standard format.
Moreover, I emailed the author (good thing this "clunky" system exists), and offered help with a potential switch to using email. Thank you nonetheless for taking my comment into consideration. I can only hope it was more useful for other readers than it was for you.
Not intended to pick on Hack Club, but I don't see why anyone with tech competency in-house would choose Slack, and if you don't you probably have MS Teams.
I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such.
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. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29
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)
For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com
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 and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again.
Thanks for holding us accountable.
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 this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.
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> 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:
> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.
The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.
The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.
This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.
Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?
Because it sure looks that way.
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Hell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days."
Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe.
Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion.
Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?
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.
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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).
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> "Thanks for holding us accountable."
The real fallout from today may be hard to take account of.
I can't be the only one who saw this situation unfold and decided "I'll be certain to self-host if I ever set up something like this"
This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.
I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.
Appreciated that you fixed the billing process issue. Are there any other non profits that are effected or it only this one?
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.
> 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.
What was the oversight? How did you correct it?
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Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota
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
Blackmail by mistake sorry!
Thank you Denise! Christina (Hack Club cofounder)
You restored their pricing, and thats it? No gesture of goodwill to cover the cost they have borne being stressed and coming on here to post about it?
lol..... what a joke.
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.
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 comment on the other organizations who've had similar experiences recently?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287607 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
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(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
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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.
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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 didn't go viral?
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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?
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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.
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Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake.
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
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> 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?
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>> 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 is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
0 - https://accountinginsights.org/what-is-appreciation-in-accou...
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>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:.
Undoubtedly the only mistake here was this getting attention. I'm sure hundreds of other groups have had the same experience Hack Club did.
Thank you for responding and taking this on.
> We're fixing it
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
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Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
How many other 'mistakes' are there though? How many others are being exploited but just foot the bill?
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...
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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?
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Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
You could start by explaining what exactly went wrong. Not doing that would be a mistake.
A few more heart emojis ought to make this go away.
It backfired badly, and now it was a mistake... Seems like posting it helped giving it some sort of resolution
> This was a mistake.
Yeah, right. Tell us more.
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
> This was a mistake.
I would be not at all surprised if Benioff said the initial deal was a mistake and you’ve fixed it now.
Nevertheless glad to see someone here trying to put out the fire, even if in the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.
How many others get this treatment without the publicity, y'all still showed your colors. Enjoy your business practices.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
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*This was a mistake on knowing this would blow up
Will there be a publicly available post-mortem when the root cause has been identified?
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
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What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
This wasn't a mistake, you got caught.
Since everything is being fixed, does that mean that "Hack Club" is not going to move to mattermost after all?
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Can you explain the nature of the mistake?
Like someone who didn't know or a change that they were lumped into?
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 I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
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Thanks, Rob, for owning up to it and doing something about it.
I definitely heard about another nonprofit group that got similarly punted last quarter, or maybe the quarter before... shame I can't remember it now.
Way to go Rob! Thanks for owning up to it. And for being persistent about correcting it.
so you couldn't respond to your client but had enought time to make an account and post here because of the blowback?
lol a "mistake"
Feeling incredulous that this "mistake" ever would have been rectified had it not been for the public attention this is getting.
this era of trying to fly under the radar until you get called out on HN is a really great look
/s
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[flagged]
Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.
Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.
Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.
I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
I'm surprised you aren't still going to move hosting. Now you have more time to do it carefully and not get burned again.
Thanks for keeping us posted, Christina!
Definitely like to judge folks based on how they fix (systemically!) problems. That said, did any kids in the club voice concerns about staying with an organization which had such a [potentially] severe incident?
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I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
Do you have his email address? Send it to christina@hackclub.com
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If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.
We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.
That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.
https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
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Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.
Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.
And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.
Zulip is awesome too. On prem.
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Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.
this is what we're doing :)
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(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman):
"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:."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980
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?
When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.
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They're shaking everyone down, it's been going on for years. They want huge sums of money to maintain chat history. I'm watching orgs left and right move to teams, not because it's better in anyway, but because it's basically free.
"This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.
i posted a comment saying as much but deleted it. I had a client 8-9 years ago where Salesforce showed up with a bill in the millions and said "pay up or your org/instance and all your data is gone". "Shakedown" is exactly how the client described it.
Salesforce is in the business of forcing sales.
I see what you did there. Upvoted for something or other.
Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?
We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.
Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.
I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.
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In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.
On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away.
I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
Still a dick move.
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You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
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The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future
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I have a key for https://once.com/campfire by 37Signals.com, which is an alternative to Slack, that I could offer in-kind to Hack Club - if desired.
It's open source and you own your own data.
So you know - campfire is now open source.
https://x.com/dhh/status/1963675999012552970
It's free now, they released it for free in most recent Railsconf.
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.
You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?
Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
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> Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29.
Last year Salesforce launched Agentforce and gave everyone a free year. Dreamforce is coming up next month, I wonder how many companies are going to find themselves in a similar situation to yours...
This makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them to another piece of software.
Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
>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
While I don't use slack and am barely familiar with its functionality, this stuck out just as an example of how important it is to export and save backups of anything you do with a third-party platform that your business completely depends on. That by itself is dangerous but at least saving all those DMs and channel content would have been a good idea.
As far as I understand, there are apps that let you do this. 11 years is a lot to lose.
is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?
Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?
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Have you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?
I saw the post title and immediately thought of you guys - really scary situation! Very happy to hear that Slack reached out with a solution.
Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
That's hard on a fast deadline.
maybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.
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?
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.
yall should look into migrating away from Slack after this incident even though they "fixed" the billing issue.
Glad it got resolved, if this isn’t an excellent reason to get off slack and a perfect illustration sd to why owning your data matters then I don’t know what is.
I hear mattermost is a good alternative and you can self host it.
Good luck, I’m sure teaching teens to code as a nonprofit is hard work enough, I can’t imagine worrying about losing 11 years worth of messsges on top of it.
Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?
This is very well explained in the linked post.
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“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”
You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?
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Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
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> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack
Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?
Then they lose their 11 years of history
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Happy to help, did you consider https://getstream.io/chat/ ?
You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.
I’ve not heard of getstream. Is your service open source and all data easily extracted?
This post serves as a cautionary tale about how privately owned walled gardens, no matter how pretty, leave you in a precarious position. I suspect being in control of their data and having an open source escape hatch is what’s driving the adoption of Mattermost.
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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 nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
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 absolutely do not use their AI
That sounds quite a bit like fraud.
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It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.
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Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
Oh so there’s a history of dark patterns too? Colour me surprised.
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?
Thank you for the correction! I meant to type "the pricing where the buyer's remaining profit is exactly zero", and I'm not sure whether I accidentally deleted some text or what. I was pretty tired.
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to "difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll understand their intended meaning.
"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.
This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....
https://hackclub.com/
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
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Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
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> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...
I am a teenager and I approve this statement!
Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>
They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.
Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
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Slack used to allow you to connect your own clients using open standards. And then they suddenly didn't.
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
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Discord server it is! /s (but not really)
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
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Looks like it's time for them to sponsor an open source Slack-killer.
The revenue is from contributions
Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
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Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
If you scare a bunch of kiddos gonna take over your job, maybe your job is not that important.
This is not zero sum.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
We know a fun and interesting thing and we want to share it.
You could use the same argument to stop teaching many other useful skills to kids. It's a bad argument.
this is called gatekeeping by the way and it's very annoying when you're conscious that it's happening and it's against you
Are you comfortable sharing a little information on your background and such? Adding a little context
(the comment you made surprised me)
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If you are willing to mess with kids how is your behaviour with coworkers?
Programming is much, much bigger than writing and maintaining stuff for businesses.
It's a way to create many forms of art, solve everyday problems and automate a plethora of machines in our homes.
You sound like an accountant whining about kids learning about calculators and statistics.
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
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Benioff is Ellison's protégé. Why expect anything less?
> this behavior reminds me of Oracle
I'm sure Salesforce is terrified of growing their market cap by 3x
Funny because Salesforce grew out of Oracle and initially sought to become the anti-Oracle. What was their pitch? Rent your software?
Have you not seen Oracle's price lately?
Salesforce has succeeded in spite of Marc Benioff - but I do wonder how long that can last.
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Oracle soon owns part of TikTok. So do they own teens? Will teens be liability?
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I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.
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Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.
Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.
Hey, I think we agree on something.
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
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Slack has always had a bottom-up sales funnel (i.e. the "land and expand" "shadow IT" model), so I'm not sure this is true.
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They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.
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Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.
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People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad.
But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.
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Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.
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I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.
But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...
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Sure, pretty much anyone in a sales position that has had to use something else. Salesforce is bad, their competition is trash.
My sales people love it.
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Never used it, so I don't hate it yet.
But they use the dreamy McConaughey for their ads, so they must be a good company. /s
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies
>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.
I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
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As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
And then Broadcom bought CA and doubled down on it.
Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.
I believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.
You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.
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Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
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Salesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s in an epic doom loop.
On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble.
Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.
Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.
> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.
Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.
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That's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.
What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
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> But does it really matter?
I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.
And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
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I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Just seems more efficient to me.
coders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that has worked on writing code for it hates it
Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters". They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
True whitehats are cucks, change my mind.
Indeed, for for-profit companies.
They too can buy the exploits off the market as well. Just, the price for the company is 25x higher than individual costs.
If corporations can price discriminate on non-EEOC metrics, so can I.
Just wait till they learn about Broadcom!
And yet entirely predictable.
Who cares? Managers just bagged fat bonus and jump ship when it goes down. The whole world is like this now /s.
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation
I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.
Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
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I'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things though.
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
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I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
Does give you more things to 'hack' for the club. Not all bad I guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some 'new projects'.
Matrix would be a better alternative
mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
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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 exist.
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.
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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.’
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I'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.
The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.
Yeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence, which is buried at the very end, after all the images.
If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.
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> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)
I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
Perpetual licenses aren’t a panacea given that old software doesn’t have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of support is lacking.
Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?
Zulip is great
Campfire is definitely not FOSS: https://once.com/license
Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository.
https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
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That's an outdated license web page dated 2024, see "Copyright © 2024" at the bottom.
The code was made free in 2025 per X post dated Sep 12, 2025 by Jason Fried [0], screenshot available [1].
A quote from Fried's tweet:
Here's a quote from https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICE...
[0] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560
[1] https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png
Why not Element/Matrix?
It seems to be a more popular and mature choice, and it is open source too.
There's really nothing like Slack in my uninformed opinion.
Slack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways. (- a hack club member)
I think it would be silly to not proceed with the migration, although hopefully there's less stress to do it quickly. Slack has shown they can't be trusted.
I’m not sure they could have been trusted at any time, their inventives are not aligned with HackClub’s.
Yes! Only now they don't have to rush it quite as much.
+1 this is my personal opinion, will post an update as a reply to my original comment once the team reaches a consensus
Only because it gained so much attention.
Regardless, if they didn't understand the risks before, surely they do now. The cat's out of the bag.
Even if it was a mistake (it never is) this shows how they control YOUR data. I really hope they don't stay.
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No way to know for sure, but you are very likely correct
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.
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And what will happen after these 5 years?
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can you please link to this public announcement
https://reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack_ext...
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 though, so I sympathize.
It's craaazy what shit we put up with.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
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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.
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I’m more disgusted by the alleged humans at Slack when they inevitably reverse their decision like this and choose to lie about being incompetent over admitting to being malicious.
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
Funny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you have any references where I can read more? I didn’t hear about that
Best place for info is probably the announcements channel on Kubernetes slack. that’s a link which is a good place to start https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p17500871180...
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> if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
Is the concept of "full price" well-defined in this kind of situation?
I assumed price was always a matter of negotiation for enterprise-y sales. I'd think a "full price" would just be an attempt at anchoring by the vendor.
That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory.
If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.
Maybe, but theres a real benefit to getting your tool in the hands of ambitious kids if you want to sustain a market share once those kids grow older.
There's a reason Apple still gives pretty solid educational discounts even as the largest consumer hardware manufacturer.
It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.
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Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this
It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
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I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.
Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.
Slack is not a VC backed service right now. It is owned in full by Salesforce.
Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea and that I agree with.
Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.
Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.
Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers.
I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...
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A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams.
I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.
Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.
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People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
> to Slack from Teams
They're the same thing in terms of billing and data.
Hey! I have an open-source project for browsing an exported slack archive, it may be useful to you so you can see and search the history: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser
I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)
A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
Mattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages
https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...
I have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now.
It really hasn’t required any maintenance at all beyond incrementing the version number.
They are starting to tighten the screws (showing admins a warning if you have over 2500 users), but it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.
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From one walled garden to another?
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One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them.
And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator program.
But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of customers.
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
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Yeah, I started somewhere around 6-7 Slack communities. I use exactly zero of them anymore. I still feel guilty for roping multiple communities into the service and helping multiple group of people have somewhere to hang out, only for the rug to get pulled out from under all of us.
Seeing a discord channel for special software recommended on a corporate presentation was definitely a first for me. Happened yesterday.
> they migrated to Teams or Google
Migrated to Google what?
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.
When was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.
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Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.
What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice anything bad.
It's better these day
Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.
Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.
I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.
I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.
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 integrations with Google Suite products, it might even exceed 100% now. However, Google Suite promptly raised its prices when they integrated Gemini. Nevertheless, the Google account manager provided us with significantly more advanced notice and a substantial discount.
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
Moving from one proprietary app to the next isn't a solution. No matter which commercial service you choose, there will be an attempt to squeeze more profits out of you sooner or later and you will have to pay up or lose your data.
The lesson here is that proprietary software is for suckers. Bite the bullet and move to an open protocol with FOSS clients.
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.
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. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.
She was incredibly apologetic for putting Hack Clubbers in this position and very generously offered to donate Slack Enterprise+ to Hack Club with a 5 year commitment. We think this is the best option, so we're going to move forward. Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November!
We hope this will be a great start to a renewed relationship as Hack Club has benefited tremendously from Slack's 11 year partnership. We're very grateful.
This means that all of Hack Club's history and bots will be preserved. Additionally, it will open up the path for a special Hack Club OAuth login flow to reduce friction for new Hack Clubbers and APIs to build better moderation tools.
Thank you to the enormous outpouring of support. There have been so many kind messages, emails, and even alumni from years ago reaching out. It's meant the world as we've navigated this difficult situation. @here
> 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.
It's good to hear the situation is no longer being handled in a cold, hard-deadline kind of way.
But, what would have happened to a smaller group without the ability to get this viral support and attention? Most of us in a similar situation would have struggled to get attention on the matter.
As happy as I am to see this being handled better, it was a stark reminder that self-hosting is sometimes worth the trouble.
Hack Club may well recover from this, but they will never get back the time, energy, and focus they put into a problem that should never have happened.
Similarly, I doubt anything Slack could do at this point could convince me to trust them not to rug-pull me in future.
Wow! You still trust them?
Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack. We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc. Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.
Not sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.
there exists a fork that is basically limitless https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter so if that ever becomes a problem you just swap server binary
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Thanks for pointing that out. I was exploring self-hosted Mattermost recently, and completely missed this.
Good news and good luck with that, hopefully Mattermost will behave better.
Make sure to warn others of Slack/Salesforce, customers need to have a voice and this behavior must become prohibitly expensive for Salesforce.
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
Another good lesson here: at the end of the day, these are just websites. Don't lose sleep over it. If it's broken for a couple of days, that's ok.
I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost (integration) in a couple of days.
I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.
welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry
Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need. It happens, but should not be in the curriculum for kids.
I am sure that being forced to spend time on this steals time from more interesting projects.
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Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?
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 educate young people in coding and technology, and we regret the concern this situation has caused. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I wonder if anything would have been done if there wasn't a public uproar.
The answer to this is nearly always "No"
> the situation has been resolved
Slack cannot unilaterally “resolve” this situation, and their proposed solution doesn’t seem to address the concerns that were raised in the first place.
Yes it does. They don’t have to pay $200k/yr + $50k immediately, and don’t have to spend the time, effort, and money on self-hosting and migrating away.
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“to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.”
So… still $200K for a scrappy nonprofit, just a month’s lead time instead of a week. Got it.
“Oh shit, we’ve been on HN #1 for a day, how do we control the damage”
Classic "I'm sorry we go caught"
Do you mind me asking if you'll be self hosting mattermost? If so they're moving to a 1000 User hard limit for self hosted instances. https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
Seems like they've gone past even their own '1000' users. In v11 it's a cap of 250 users! They're also rapidly removing features for team too.
- User limits were lowered to final threshold of 250 for Mattermost Team Edition - GitLab SSO has been deprecated from Team Edition. - Playbooks has stopped working for Team Edition.
I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
What's happening on the hosted side of things? Ah; - Introduced support for Mattermost Entry Edition with message history limits.
How is the user limit enforced? Clearly if the project is FOSS, such an anti-feature can be trivially patched out. Or so you would think...
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Calls plugin has been restricted to only DMs (so no group calls and so on too)
That discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"
Yes, I mean they are not difficult to remove, but I think it would be fair to add the context that they're going to have to fork it. E.g open source is not a panacea either, they will likely also struggle with postgres being a bottleneck for that number of users (particularly on search), the redis integration is not part of open core.
It also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may 2024 ? https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own fork.
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There are plans to fork the repo at some point, since we do depend on lots of custom features eventually regardless (and nearly everything at HC is open source).
There are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0]. One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why.
Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
> the company started as the anti-Oracle.
The company was founded by an Oracle executive...
I mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they want to mow lawns.
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My first thought was had this moved the stock price - but the day price is up. The 5Y price is back to where it was ... over all they're still 6000% up.
S&P 500 up 3x in 5Y so back to same level isn’t great
I guess stock price is a reflection of crap management which in return leads to these behaviours. Maybe I should check the stock price first before deciding on a product.
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.
Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable alternative.
Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue stream from users or they don’t want the overhead of maintaining those users.
From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.
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Because microsoft would never do such a thing
So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!
At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.
With moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if desired).
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I don’t think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer how sticky are these products.
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.
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they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course
I mean we all know Microsoft and their reputation, but they not exactly known for rising price x40 for non-profits.
Usually Microsoft was opposite: giving a lot of software for education for cheap or free to vendor lock-in people into their stack.
NOT advocating for using Teams because God please no, but Microsoft reliability us much better than Salesforce.
Mattermost is crippling their open-source edition and it gets worse every year. At the same time, it's difficult not to update, since the mobile app will require a new server version, and most regular users install and auto-update the mobile apps.
It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.
In what way is it crippling?
(I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)
Mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287107
I really wish this post had more details.
How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing?
If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!
I find this absolutely ridiculous and I question how this can even be legal. Surely a contract cannot be unilaterally changed on such short notice?
Imagine your landlord increased the rent by 4000% and it's due in 5 days or you're out on the street.
Sure, they have the right to increase their prices, but there should be at least a month notice for something like this.
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment?
Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.
Exactly what you’d expect from a sales department at risk of missing their arr target this quarter.
Almost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits. Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a standard playbook.
What I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more interesting to me than a story with fewer ones.
They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
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We are using a hosted Zulip instance for company chats at Kagi, not just to prevent scenarios like this but also for data privacy reasons.
Based on California’s Automatic Renewal Law and contract principles, what you’ve described raises serious concerns:
In California, companies must provide clear written notice of any material change to renewal terms and obtain consent before billing under new terms. Changing pricing from a staff-only basis to billing every user—without a new contract or notice—appears inconsistent with that law.
Telling you to ignore invoices, then demanding immediate payment with a threat of total service shutoff, could be construed as coercive and in bad faith.
Recommendations:
Put everything in writing. Send Salesforce/Slack a formal letter citing Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17600–17606 (Automatic Renewal Law) and demanding they extend service during resolution.
Request a 90-day transition period to migrate, framed as reasonable and legally necessary under consumer protection standards.
Escalate to Salesforce legal/compliance. If necessary, copy the California Attorney General’s consumer protection unit.
Preserve evidence. Save all communications, invoices, and contract copies.
This doesn’t mean you should stop negotiating, but you have a strong basis to demand more time and push back on the sudden payment demand.
Thanks ChatGPT
Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad.
Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.
When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.
We've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more just cost or self-hostable.
This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.
If you’re going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat conversations back into email, you might as well throw those summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..
This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.
You are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before having gone through arbitration.
Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if you are dead.
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Where’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t the smartest people. I went through a similar drama with AWS a few years ago and after months of sleepless nights I decided to open a case with the office of the attorney general in my state. They were pretty quick to follow up m and contacted AWS directly. My case was resolved a few days after that.
Hi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.
>It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law.
Under what principle? They were near the end of their contract, so there's no legs to stand on. It's not like there's rent controls for SaaS contracts.
I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough.
To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.
The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.
Cory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.
I genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and getting nothing.
Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
Agreed, it's bizarre. $5,000/yr > $0/yr. There's no way the operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000/yr.
Because the calculation is that if:
N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K
Then its a profitable operation for slack.
Maybe they were running the math expecting that the customer would bail before the year renewal, but would pay the short term extortion to migrate their data.
$50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business
If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy
It's a sign of a really poor decision making process.
They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in their workplace.
Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front of those students.
See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling/documentation.
They're not an independent business, their pricing is probably decided by Salesforce. It's probably bundled in free for Salesforce customers who buy a minimum of X seats.
Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.
Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.
We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.
The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".
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Yeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Can’t imagine there’s many people still left using it now.
> Yeah they fucked Heroku hard
Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable
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Hundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet it’s a downward trend with no hope of a turnaround.
We just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago. Good riddance.
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I still have old personal projects on there
Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over
We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version).
I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?
I get the sense that Mattermost is the same kind of eventually-get-you-paying play as Slack.
Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free as well as Free open source.
We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!
We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should stop falling for it.
Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.
https://matrix.org/
I was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances.
You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team?
Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux, which is why I use it.
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately. I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
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Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.
I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.
And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.
And so on.
We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).
I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
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I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).
Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.
I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have time to experiment with it.
So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in this article
If you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service
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Campfire is solid: https://once.com/campfire
Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer communication.
Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.
No channels either.
Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how good the clients are though.
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
Very shameless promotion but if you really enjoy threaded chat we're building https://cushion.so which keeps everything threaded by default.
You can create DM groups with yourselves if you like private chats in groups also.
For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).
A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.
[1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai
It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
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Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.
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I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?
Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.
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Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.
Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.
I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.
It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.
As a member of the hack club slack, to update you all, we have been backing up absolutely everything and going as quick as we can
I’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others.
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work.
I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
You could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage chat for just this amount of money
Or an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.
Seems like a good lesson. Don’t trust giant corporations. Use open source solutions. Build your own. It is one thing to be told it, it is another to experience it. Short term pain, long term gain.
Since no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way to dump Slack: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?
Yes, both Mattermost and Element have tools that can.
(BTW, I tried Element and regretted it (massively lacks polish) before switching to Mattermost and I'm loving it!)
Sorry, you specifically mentioned "these dumps". I don't know about "those" dumps. Mattermost and Element can import everything from Slack, but it might require following their instructions.
This is a nightmare of a PR for Salesforce / slack. I guess someone did not do their due diligence before reaching out and informing you about the price hike.
Or didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion target".
I wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone felt very proud of having automated this important, but often neglected part of their business model.
> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.
Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though.
Meanwhile, did a bit of a test drive in my org with Mattermost, devs were mostly okay with it, but it was decided from top down to go with Teams instead. Wonder how that will work out in the next decade.
Don't need a decade, I rarely if ever see Teams not malfunctioning daily...
Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
It's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up.
My dream work chat app:
1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations
2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed
3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)
This is close to a lot of what's happening at Glue. Threads are first-class, so you can start a thread within a group - let's talk about our GraphQL schema and that thread should live in the API Development group. You can also start a thread without a group - just me and another 2 coworkers need to discuss a specific point that would be noisy for everybody else.
Glue AI can be invoked at any time in any context and you can choose whether or not you want to share your conversation with other people after the fact. MCP is also well supported so you get good integration with lots of services like Linear or Notion.
The agent isn't quite as proactive as updating documentation without being prompted right now, but it's regularly done by telling Glue AI to update pages in Notion with info from a thread.
* https://glue.ai
Didn't realize Glue was still around! Will take another look.
You're overlooking a lot of the utility of DMs for things like "Hey dude, want to grab some lunch at 12:30?"
Found the manager.
I would go mental without DMs
I am a founder of one company and work in sales. Here's where I'm coming from:
As a founder, if everyone is always DMing you, the knowledge is not shared with the team. You become the bottleneck for everything.
In sales, you end up having the #account-[customer] thread and about 4 or 5 DM groups with different internal people on them for each account. Lots of time bringing everyone up to speed when it could be more unified.
Sure, there are sensitive issues like employee conflict, salary discussions, etc. I'm not saying everything needs to be in the public. But I think DMs as they work in Slack cause more issues than they solve.
>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost.
I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough. Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.
If there's one good thing to say about Microsoft (not about Teams), it's that they strive to keep good business relationships with their clients, including backwards compatibility. I don't think I've ever heard of a story like this about Microsoft.
That is true, but perhaps part of the lesson is you can’t count on that staying the same as executives change and companies get new goals, such as stock price.
Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers!
https://www.discourse.org/
https://flarum.org/
https://www.simplemachines.org/
Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
I set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try again though.
If you want help, I'm more than willing.
I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...
I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)
It's well documented and very easy to follow, just need to run a few Ansible scripts
Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.
We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
At my work we use Zulip, and I haven't really found many people complaining about it. At least on iOS works just fine for me.
We found worse mobile apps was good because it put boundaries around our interactions and kept us using it in a focused way during work hours.
The Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.
Can you elaborate on "threaded nature"? Mattermost has threads...
Something similar happened to another independent tech educator who was running a slack community for his niche. [1]
Slack has completely gone down hill since the salesforce acquisition.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
Our company wants to move away from Google Chat, I'm happy that Slack is letting us know upfront that they won't have to be considered at all.
> 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 Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
Oh, 7 days to cough up $50k, cool. Slack enters my list of companies I will never do business with and actively dissuade everyone else from doing so.
Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...
Just IRC with
- a decent mobile client that uses the same account - and decent notification system - a backlog that survives disconnects - a search - file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also persist - markdown
But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.
With file hosting. Which can occupy a lot of storage, but yeah, pricing is still insane.
For those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl).
Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.
The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open.
For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile
I can’t really comment on video calls in Matrix since I never used them in Slack either. For me the main draw is having one tool that does one job well, rather than trying to be the all-in-one hub for everything. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s actually good at that, instead of relying on a centralized system that tries to cover all bases but ends up being mediocre at most of them.
It has been a year or two since I used Slack heavily, but when I did the video calls were unreliable and poor. Maybe it has improved since then.
The responses you're getting perfectly encapsulate the problem.
I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but "<x> client sucks, use <y> client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.
I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads. Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy. The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for me.
I recommend Matrix, and it works well for me. I'm using Element (old) on Android though, not Element X.
Around a year ago I could do calls reliably on it, but recently I have been having a bad experience, I am not sure what changed.
Are you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?)
(Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you give the app total permission to run in the background they should work.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.
If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.
Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
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I was using element X. I can re-install the stack and see if things have improved. If you want someone to debug with I'll gladly hop on a call to see if I'm doing something wrong. The jist of my setup was postgres, coturn, element web and synapse with traefik in front of it exposed to the web in a docker compose
Maybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month:
- https://once.com/campfire
- https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.
It's also not a coincidence that Slack is neutering the ability to access channel history via the API very soon. With a very generous rate limit of 2 requests per minute I believe it was and a max of ~10 messages. This is already enforced for new marketplace apps and will apply to all apps starting in March according to their docs.
And archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace… very aggressive move to destroy free and non enterprise tier
I'm surprised GDPR has nothing to say about this. You should have the right to your data, but I suppose that doesn't extend to companies?
Slack claims to be data processor, not data controller [0]. The workspace admins are, ironically, considered by slack to be data controllers, so GDPR-related requests are supposed to be handled by them.
This is ironic though, as in the Pro plan they do not offer options to admins to download everything (eg DMs). So as an EU citizen I cannot request all my data, but technically it is the data controller who is responsible for it here (my workspace admin). Not sure how that would fly if somebody took the effort to seriously look into it though.
Also not sure how easy it is for an admin to download and provide me even my data from the public channels in the first place with the current tools. I am pretty sure there is no GDPR compliance overall, but it is probably not trivial to get slack actually accountable for it.
PS It seems the workspace owner has to contact slack about it, and this is for both free and pro plan where downloading direct messages/private channels is not an option by default. [1]
[0] https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy
> In general, Customer is the controller of Customer Data. In general, Slack is the processor of Customer Data and the controller of Other Information.
[1] https://slack.com/help/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-imp...
EU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to roll out.
It does to some extent, because companies have to respect gdpr for their own users as well: so individual employees/slack users have gdpr rights and they individually can get those enforced against the slack operators.
what kind of joke is this...
Unpopular opinion: I think it's wild that ANY ORG would pay $200k for a chat app. If I ever ran an org that needed a chat app and the costs came even close to $200k a year, I would rather hire an engineer, contract a designer, and create our own, or more likely, contribute/fork an open source project like Matrix; providing us with the ability to *really* integrate it into our company/tools - as oppose spending it on IRC+ for "good enough" integration. PLUS ... our data stays on under our control.
Not unpopular at all. That’s the way
I would say and non-profit. For a larger company like, idk, AT&T or IBM or Goldman and Sachs, $200k/yr would be cheap to handle all of the internal chat.
So many stories like this about Slack.
We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!
Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too
It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
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go to product > self-hosting
you might notice it's 100% free software
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...
It is open source and you can self host it.
“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.
Indeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.
A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.
VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.
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Proton did this without warning with their upgrade coupons back in day. Still salty.
Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element https://element.io/, I don't know why more people don't do this.
I personally would’ve gone for matrix since it’s free and open source, but I’m sure this license will be better..
I have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very responsive as backend support.
I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.
IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available.
I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
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 automation that is kicking in when it shouldn't be?
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.
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 better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
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.
Mattermost is open source, but the licensing is complex and full of bullshit. It is not a community driven project. Once you have installed the self hosted solution, you get a user interface that asks you to upgrade to the enterprise edition in every corner and menu.
A self hosted version is better than nothing though.
I switched from Slack to Discord back in 2017 and I can't imagine ever going back. Their free offering is better than what you get for $$$$ from Slack.
Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers far more granular controls.
They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.
I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam...
Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.
This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.
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I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.
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The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.
Honestly, I did not know Salesforce had bought Slack. I would encourage everyone here to avoid that company - their business model seems to be create a spiderweb of critical touch points within an organisation and its data then suddenly hike prices. Certainly in this case but I’ve heard it happen with other products too.
From Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher well.
This is a good reminder why it's important to own your communication stack yourself. Could happen also to all the projects relying on Discord etc.
I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.
It's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all around the world.
You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)
Sounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this headache.
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Hi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of all the groups that we sponsor.
Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.
That’s salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.
It's Salesforce...
This is why I use open source or buy services based more on the company than the product itself... Not a fan of rug-pulls...
Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?
Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
So it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan. That's a different story altogether and makes more sense for the timeline involved.
If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad
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It was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and there was a special contract drawn with HC (that's the 5000/yr mentioned in the original post).
Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year
Why did they switch? Given the information provided, it seems that paying anything, if you're on a grandfathered free plan, is a bad deal.
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If you are going the way to self-host it so you own all your won data. all you have to do is run mattermost in production on hardware you control at 99.9% Or 80% or whatever uptime is deemed necessary.
Or you can use an out of the box host, but then your data is not in your direct control.
If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
Set it up earlier than late, if you're expecting 7 days notice before deletion
Frankly, not having an alternative identified for all hosted corporate services and maybe even at the ready with regularly maintained deployment and transition plans is and long has been reckless at this point.
Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion.
Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
That seems an unreasonable bar for all services. Even if you have identified say, Gogs to replace your Github instance, there are so many practical realities of porting a large installation that your simulacra instance is offering nothing.
I'd get off ASAP.
I can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0]
I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.
[0] https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/
Well, that's a good case study for teens who are learning and are going to join this industry. If you rent instead of owning, you can be rugpulled at any moment. And then your only hope is getting viral on Reddit/HN/other places.
As long as consumer protection is an afterthought companies will continue to change their agreements after purchase and screw over consumers.
I'm left to wonder why do we even use words anymore, when tipping isn't optional, when purchasing doesn't mean you own the thing you buy, and an agreement can be changed without notice.
Why is it called tip and not fee. Why is it called purchase and not rent. Why is it called agreement and not... well I don't even know what to call that... a pinky promise?
We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation.
I just can't trust anything anymore.
The fact they think they can charge this much tells me that there is a lot of room for competition in the webguis for irc space.
Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till February but this would make a nice Christmas project.
New projects in that genre keep popping up, for example eIRC: An Enterprise Chat System Based on IRC https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
we built a tool on slack for communities and companies, and then did some outreach to community leaders about trying it out. they almost universally said that they hated being captive to slack and wanted to transition away.
Slack responded on twitter: https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173
We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.
Let's revisit this assessment in a few years.
we've been using discord for years, it's great. Its model for making money is different, its primary market is gamers. Servers are content for their users to consume and they charge the users directly.
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As someone who helps run another volunteer tech nonprofit that relies on slack, is there a reason they kicked you off the free nonprofit plan? Asking to have a good backup plan for our community.
Integrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and provide an off ramp in the meantime
0: https://www.linen.dev/
If we donate to Hack Club, can we put a stipulation that it's not used to pay the Salesforce ransom? :) But I see that they're reversing course, which is good at least.
Seriously though, I'm not sure how I've never heard of Hack Club before. I love the cause and wish I had such a thing when I was younger. Hopefully they see an uptick in donations with all the fellow techies reading your post!
My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.
The problem with these companies is that they suffer from the equivalent of golden handcuffs. They already have customers paying through the nose for overpriced products. It is very hard, psychologically, to admit you cannot charge the same amount anymore. And if you make a change you have to reduce the price for existing customers as well.
Most companies with these models will die simply because they won't have the courage and long term thinking to do this.
Out of curiosity, what's keeping you in slack ecosystem? Why not leverage Discord and run on your own server? Wouldn't that be a much economical alternative to begin with?
Consider building your own (many large communities do). https://getstream.io/chat/
It's super simple to build with Stream and far lower costs than Slack. (i'm the CEO, founder so don't take my word for it). But we have quite a few customers building either communities into their app or large companies running integrated chat workflows. (think airline operations, construction collaboration etc.)
There is also IRC, which has web frontends like KiwiRC.
I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.
It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.
Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.
> refuse to let them export it
Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.
You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.
Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).
But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.
I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.
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Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.
Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar.
Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
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"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
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Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.
A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...
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It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk.
It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange.
It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
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"we want something that is standard".
Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.
Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
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I think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability.
The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people + using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.
I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
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I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.
Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business.
If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.
I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.
But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.
I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.
I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high. Someone then has to say "no".
Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)
I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
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Slack is based upon IRC. IRC is a free and open chat protocol that anybody can easily self host on the oldest hardware.
IRC is command driven and scary. Terrifying.
That people would pay thousands of dollars a year for vendor lock-in and that will abuse their privacy for a visually pleasing alternative is a quite a business model. It’s like targeting people with a history of abuse because you know they are exploitable and will eagerly fulfill your desires.
We need a blacklist of vendors that subject clients to extortion. As per user reports, two such vendors are Cloudflare and now Slack. These are to be avoided at all costs.
The bad actors are pretty well known:
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- SalesForce
- Broadcom
We figured out a decade ago or so that Slack was entirely unsustainable for any kind of community type usage. Glad to see that more people are coming to that realization.
I suspect that the same applies to discord.
Do not use Slack.
A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst.
But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.
The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?
IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.
I think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just "tricked" into thinking this.
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https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack
Slack is easily the worst platform I can think of using for something like this. Why would you not be using discord instead? You know, the free platform that every teenager is already using? You could archive your messages using any number of bots.
Slack is fundamentally wrong for this kind of thing. Every time I find out the support channels for anything is a slack server, I groan. The whole workspace setup is awful.
Shout out to those who give their time to open-source free to use projects. You make the internet a more tolerable place.
this is bad
but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway
developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one
it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing.
Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
Personally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative.
There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman <https://stallman.org/slack.html>
Convenience is king, and unfortunately Matrix is not very convenient. Way too cumbersome to get going from a user perspective.
Maybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and landed at: https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/
…Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
The cloud is other people's computers.
Rented apartments are just someone else's house.
These things being true does not negate the standard practice of respectful contract negotiation.
True. And I don't want to stretch the analogy too far, but it's harder to evict someone from a house they own.
Last year Hostgator suddenly changed the conditions of my plan without any warning at a renewal time so I "conveniently" went over the storage quota, then shut me down. I had to pay the extortion fee to restore service. Needless to say, I'll be moving before the next renewal.
For changes of this size, to any client, grace and care is the well trodden path. The only case where this isn't the route is when you don't want that customer, or where you can no longer afford that customer. Does it seem like the cost of AI on everything is coming home to roost?
"[..] With that being said though, this ordeal has made us think more deeply about entrusting data with external SaaSes and ensuring that we own our data is definitely going to be a very big priority going forward. I’d encourage you to think the same way! [..]"
Full ack!
>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.
Is this still the case? I sure hope so.
First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
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We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack
So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency
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It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe Zulip is better?
Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.
Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min ago)
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No first hand experience, but campfire (https://once.com/campfire) seems like a pretty great solution for this problem.
Not affiliated, just sharing in case it’s useful for OP or others.
saas are really owning themselves by pulling crap like this.
I work in education sector, over the last year or so multiple saas providers have pulled this, we've inevitably gone in house, self hosted, open source. Saved tonnes of money and have bought skills back in house.
Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:
"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."
So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive.
I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
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Makes some sense to me.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
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Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
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Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.
> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements
clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery
The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.
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I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
We use Slack extensively and I'm searching for info in conversations from months or even years ago regularly.
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
That's so annoying, but all things considered, a universal blessing in disguise now that the team is moving to an open source solution.
Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.
sad that open protocols lost chat wars.
Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch of people clueless about average user's woes.
"let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server some things just outright not work!"
Thank goodness we have a hundred improved protocol alternatives now. Matrix, Tox, Jami, Briar.
I'm curious about the choice of mattermost, which also looks like it's $10/user/month, not cheap! I guess they do have non-profit pricing for self-hosted. Curious if self-hosted mattermost is what Hack Club is looking at?
Hack club member and volunteer here, we are selfhosting a fork of mattermost on our own infra
You can self host for free. You lose some features, but overall it’s still pretty good.
Can someone please tell me why on earth people pay $10/month per user for what is basically just a chat service?
There are countless free alternatives available. When did paying for group chat become a thing?
I have never been able to understand the Slack fetish most tech people have. IMO MS Teams is feature-wise better in most cases. Especially functionality for formatting posts is far better in Teams.
> 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 Slack
Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? That’s some big city mobster tactics right there
"Hi Stewart Butterfield here, I cofounded Slack and I'm sorry about this. We're taking steps to fix this from happening again and Skyfall will have free Slack for life"
Hypothetical easy win for Slack here.
I use pikapods to cheaply host a couple Open Source apps. They support Mattermost: https://www.pikapods.com/apps
I pay about $90/month for a small company I own. I've been thinking about moving off Slack, but this is a good push over the edge. I am going to migrate over to once.com/campfire.
Monopoly is the biggest problem of our generation. I hope a side effect of AI coding is that enough people create alternative tech to replace tech monopolies products. But that is a long shot.
Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?
yep! Hard, but possible.
If others find themselves in a similar situation you could look at https://once.com/campfire
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.
Campfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.
> Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
Just don't use it then. It's bloated non-free software. There are all sorts of free alternatives.
Question must be asked: why would anyone teach teenagers coding these days?
People naturally love coding, especially teens. It's addictive. And it no longer leads to any career prospects, or chances to contribute to society, or money, or anything really. It's over as a mass occupation. Addicting teens to it does them a bad service. In the future, personality traits that will lead to happiness and success will be opposite to those nurtured by coding, or are typical among professional coders: empathy, likability, social skills... Kids who got hooked on coding now, are heading for a life of misery.
It's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is high enough
Man, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.
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, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles.
For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs).
MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals.
And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.
I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.
So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.
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 :(.
matrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and truly federated.
PSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.
IRC would not be useful for Hack Club as it's only text. Hack Club requires software that allows us to upload images, create canvases and most importantly, call with others.
Not saying there's a turnkey solution at the moment for your exact needs, but even with your current $5k/year budget something interesting could be built with the "modern IRC stack" that https://irctoday.com/ uses, for example. Call support would have to be done by integrating Jitsi, but it's been done before as seen in https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference and https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support
They're serving notice. Data in vendor custody belongs to the vendor, not to the customer. Customers can go to court to prove otherwise.
Can obe simply export all the data and dump that in Dropbox (for interim).
Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no lost data that way.
Ok, I really think this is going to cost me karma, but the snyde remark has to be made.
They don't do "Sales", they do "Salesforce"d.
Please frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues" with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".
A hard lesson in enterprise software is that customers hate surprises on their bill. Don't price in a way that can happen.
What "years of institutional knowledge" does Hack Club and others have in Slack? I assume anything more than a week old to be unsearchable. In fact I want chats older than 1 week to be deleted so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
You would be surprised how many companies use bookmarked Slack posts as their wiki!
> so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
Weirdly this part never actually happens.
my favorite part of joining a new team is reading old merge requests and tickets that have a summary of "the reason is based this slack conversation" and then have a link to a slack conversation from a year ago... in an org that deletes slack chats older than 1 year.
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There are a few rare folks that love writing wiki pages, the catch is getting one on the team.
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We extensively use Canvases, as well as pinned messages and message links to reference others. As in, I often need to look at older messages, very occasionally years old, but usually within the month.
Slack is still a thing?
At this rate it's cheaper to pay a full time DevOps team to run several Matrix servers so you have high availability.
I tried to like Matrix but the UX was just so bad! Switched to Mattermost and I couldn't be happier. Everything that I liked about Slack.
Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?
Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc
I considered championing transitioning my workplace to Slack as the disdain for Teams keeps growing. Nevermind.
I am building basecase.ai to finally replace slack in 2025. Would love people to try and share their feedback.
Nothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.
It's OK to end a discount program, but not by threatening to delete everything with 7 days notice.
Let's hope Slack learns from this and fixes their billing procedure at least. Intentional or not.
How does contract law allow this? Is this tactic a common pattern for VC funded or acquired companies?
>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community.
>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 Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
>One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more.
This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
What details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.
Reading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication with Slack since then.
The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key element to this story, but that is glossed over.
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Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.
Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?
We switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more consistency.
We're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't lose it (Google drive mainly).
And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.
Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
> And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution
It's uh... not good? I have one client that uses it, and it's just painful. Threading doesn't work well, notifications are hard to configure, rich text entry is subtly broken...
I stopped being a fan of slack long ago. Such better and free alternatives.
switch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go proprietary again!
Are there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot comprehend.
Important to know how to get out of a service faster than you got into it.
This when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible software !
This is remarkably familiar.
SaaS is a trap. They silo up your business data then hold it hostage.
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.
Sounds like a replacement for slack is needed
well thanks Slack ! now I know about Zulip ! which looks quite nice
cheers to all
Move to Zulip already...
Anyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option
Wonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.
Please consider IRC or something open protocol instead.
$200k for chat is insane. Even $5k for chat is insane
Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.
I'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.
> a pretty massive sum of money
I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
In the article, this isn't a business. It's a nonprofit.
For 99.9% of nonprofits, their annual budgets are in the single digit thousands or less. A sudden $250k bill is fatal.
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Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!
It's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can afford it (or borrow it).
I'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
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This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.
Even $50,000/yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind to just stave them off for a week.
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You could pay for 200-300 MS Teams seats for a decade with that kind of money pile, or a F100-sized Oracle database instance.
I went through the whole slack->mattermost pipeline a very long time ago to avoid (at the time) Skype for business and the initial rollout of Teams.
It turns out we wasted a lot of time trying to be clever and not pay the devil for his services. Unfortunately, there are some proprietors in the space who occasionally make the devil look like a saint. I'd rather do business with him than return a call to a "at least it's not you-know-who" company that fucked me this hard. The devil is brutal but not this brutal. Larry Ellison would at least have his sales people buy me a fancy steak dinner first.
Slack is doing questinonable things anyways. When we migrated away from it to Teams, I wanted to export the workspace to be able to look stuff up in case we need it. We are a very small company and had the smallest plan, no chance, export only with the expensive plan.
Since I'm located in europe, I thought of just doing a data request based on GDPR (at least for my messages). They declined it and referred me to my organization, since we are in charge of fulfilling such requests (how would we even do that if there's no functionality for it?). Absolutely ridiculous.
Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!
The chickens have come home to roost.
great article and I really hope that hack club continues on without slack, and maybe even do better.
i wish discord worked better for work
I wish it worked worse and people stopped used it as a replacement for forums.
Its 2025, people don't want their conversations out on the public internet to be mined and profiled. Discord offers that base privacy.
it has forums now :)
skulk thats only for fun and games sob
Switch to teams. Not that hard.
Tell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform that the teens and kids already use: Discord.
Not open either, so that'll go the same way in the end. People will want more money no? Or get bought and then the buyers want more money... Pick something open and self hosted OR that at least allows you to move everything and tinker with it yourself when (not if) the company becomes evilll.
Just another middle-aged SaaS company, with no new ideas, now moving to the bend-your-customers-over-the-table phase, in order to keep ARR increasing.
Sympathetic to the customers, but not surprised.
Gives real Salesforce energy.
Maybe Mattermost is solution?
If only they'd written they're moving to Mattermost in TFA.
Edit: oh wait there it is:
"Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost."
What a dick move to do that.
Time to switch to Mattermost.
Did you read the article?
Narrator: they did not.
never seen 3265 points for HN post the product seems so bad
not only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps
the extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going
At a 2.5% success rate this breaks even
should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
Just more of the same
No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
It is free, as I understand it, not 200k per year.
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How about not relying on a third party for your organization...
I guess history repeat.
Slack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force migration.
Hasn’t Slack had per user pricing for a very long time?
And wasn’t the free version made kind of unusable through very limited retention like a decade ago?
Dumb question maybe. Can the users in Europe raise a GDPR request to extract all their data from Slack? I realise it's not easy to port the data to other platforms yet, but atleast you have a copy of the data
they could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.
I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.
A reminder that the only thing worse than paying for software is renting cloud SaaS & ceding them all your data.
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back at some point before the entire world are vassals to the same 5-10 megacap US tech companies.
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.
No sane person should pay even those $5k a year for a STUPID CHAT APP!!!
It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own shit for $5 a month, FFS!
Does this really surprise anyone. In the current en$hitification environment? The second saleforce bought slack it was dead to me. I've only got 1 workspace left on it.
Hey, I'm Rob, CPO at Slack. This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along <3.
expensive IRC with history
Nowadays even the history ain't a feature...
Sales force is going the Broadcom route. They only give a shit about megacorps that are basically trapped and anyone else can go fuck themselves.
This is so messed up! Hack Club has done and is doing amazing things for teens and young adults who love to build things. Shame on you Salesforce.
Join us now and share the software. You’ll be free.
Make your own Slack?
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 would find it confusing enough that giving up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition, we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features (think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps answer your question :)
> 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.
> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable
Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.
Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.
For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
We use a lot of Slack specific features, especially bots, and it's more of a pain to move thousands of users and channels than to just pay up.
Doesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.
This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.
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Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You're still free to connect a logging bot.
The sibling comment talks about IRCv3 features that show a limited amount of context from immediately before you joined, which is not the same as the infinite history seen in Slack and Discord.
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$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.
<nelson>Ha-Ha!</nelson> That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first place....
Slack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.
I am fairly indifferent to Slack - I have to use it for work.
But our experiences seem so vastly different: - UI is, with the exception of large media, snappy and pretty native feeling - no jumps (that I can recall)
The mobile app is okayish though its offline indication and notifications are a bit frustrating.
What machine are you running it on?
Not sure if it might be related to specific instances, i.e. large organizations with hundreds of channels, etc like in my case... still, my workstation is pretty beefy, threadripper pro 7985wx, 256GB RAM, RTX 4080 (and this is no software issue, as other, much more resource intensive apps run just fine)... though slack is unmistakably sluggish, to the point of me being frustrated enough with it to complain about it here :)
just hate it.
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never used the web app, but never noticed any sluggishness with the desktop app.
now my company „forces“ me to us Microsoft Teams and i’m thinking back to the good old days with Slack.
I run the desktop app also, but since it's just the electron packaged webapp, I expect no real difference between the two.
Welcome to Microsoft Teams
What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.
I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.
If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
> I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future
Tell that to project maintainers switching from old-school good forums to chat apps such as Discord...
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email. I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).
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I spend around 30%, if not more of my work time on Slack (collaborating with others, solving customer issues, searching, documenting)
I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like (Teams, IRC etc)
As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best keyboard etc
Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is "best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of communication tools I think the difference is huge.
Is this needed to do my work? nope It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes
People with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a company, and I find it not great if people complain about such minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks, frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.
Bring back IRC lol
That’s not what extortion means.
Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.
==
The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.
I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.
According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.
I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.
But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.
[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...
[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...
Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.
Yes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we really don't know much at all.
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I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.
The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).
I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
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I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.
Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009 with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B Salesforce acquisition.
Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.
It’s not even really just large companies, even though the extortion, predation, and vulture tactics tend to be rolled out once market capture and network effect has been achieved, which tends to correlate with being larger companies.
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
> What makes us so foolish?
High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.
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I’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale.
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book _Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book, but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses, and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating their niche with razor focus.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
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I feel like any time a company goes public they lose the ability to pass up on revenue. The C-suite report to the board, who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits.
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
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https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
What is preventing you from competing with Slack and doing “good things at scale”?
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.
37signals?
It's pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.
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TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
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That sounds awful
(sorry to be unpleasant, but.. yeah.)
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It did happen, at least from the perspective of a one year member. We had zero warning, and even core staff were caught off guard. Our migration basically began now.
I agree. If this was Oracle I might not have too difficult of a time believing this is all of the story. But I do think in this case there is more to the story.
I am willing to believe these things do happen. Different vendor, but I have experienced a price jumping 3x with one month notice before the annual renewal.
Did you miss this news?
> Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, reducing staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees · CEO Marc Benioff linked layoffs to AI automating...
Yes that was two weeks ago, but what is the relevance of that to this post?
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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How is this helpful for the non-profit?
And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.
What does grief have to do with it?
why would you not be sad about something great you lost ? Even if it was "just a freebie" ?
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Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy for the situation
Years of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy for the situation
Trying to figure out if this was the result of the sheer exhilaration of smashing the post button or a humiliation kink where you want people to yell at you
> $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid
when you are that stupid to "happily" pay 5k a year for their chat tool, you deserve that raise to 195k
Pissing off community with the word "hack" consisting of thousands of students with lots of free time to spare. I hope nothing will go wrong for salesforce after this move
Hack in this context is the software development one, i.e. 'hacking on a project' meaning working on a project. You are thinking of the cybersecurity one.
I pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don't need to be "cutting edge" all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.
There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?
I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
[0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...
[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro
> Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month
This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.
> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.
Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.
Would make much more sense to use Discord.
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Well now I'm convinced that this confusion is the root of the billing issue. Is there not a way that the clients (i.e. the students they are helping) could be added as some kind of "customer" instead of an "internal employee". If not, then yes I could see why it would be expensive.
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>maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?
I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.
[0]: https://preventcancer.org/about-us/team/
The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.
Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.
They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.
Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.
Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.
I had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using Teams was a daily battle.
Chat? No. But the strength of Teams is that it lets you do everything else you want in an integrated communications app - voice, video calls, calendars, viewing (and editing) documents, etc. At a reasonable price that Microsoft isn't going to crank to the moon.
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What are your experienced differences?
Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.
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Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need).
All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience is.
Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.
Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
I'm sorry that you read my comment as "tone deaf". It was not my intention.
> This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”.
I don't see how a comment which proposes a solution to the problem at hand can be "selfish".
I am the owner of a small business myself and am well aware of what switching tools requires. I'm also sorry that you think that modern tools like Slack or Mattermost for that matter improve communication over what email provides; then again that is obviously a matter of opinion.
> “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
The article is about a simple yet painful problem. I am proposing a solution, I don't see how my comment is not pertinent. As for my use of the word "just", simple does not mean easy.
> Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication. > > Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
False dichotomy. I truly believe that mailing lists are a great way to collaborate. Especially given the case that data ownership is now even more important to the author of the post.
Slack/Mattermost try to combine real-time chat with asynchronous information exchange. I think that that is not a great way to work, this is close enough to what I think of these solutions to [link to](https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems). Not only that but your data will always be locked away in their non-standard format.
Moreover, I emailed the author (good thing this "clunky" system exists), and offered help with a potential switch to using email. Thank you nonetheless for taking my comment into consideration. I can only hope it was more useful for other readers than it was for you.
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Not intended to pick on Hack Club, but I don't see why anyone with tech competency in-house would choose Slack, and if you don't you probably have MS Teams.
I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such.
Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.