Comment by casq

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?

Because it sure looks that way.

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.

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).

> "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?

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.

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/...

(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.

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.

> 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?

>> 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...

>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.

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...

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?

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.

*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.

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?

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.

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

[flagged]

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?

Do you have his email address? Send it to christina@hackclub.com

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

"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.

I see what you did there. Upvoted for something or other.

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.

Still a dick move.

You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.

The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future

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.

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?

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?

That's hard on a fast deadline.

This is very well explained in the linked post.

[dead]

Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....

Then they lose their 11 years of history

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.