Comment by tux3
8 months ago
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.
It's a "chat app" that includes large file uploads, video calls, and whatnot.
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Not quite, even the name is based on "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".
The value for me is in the search, recall, history.
If it was just a chat app I'd much sooner use matrix or IRC.
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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.
That is insane.
What? No? Why?
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.