Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

> 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.

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.

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).

This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.

Everything is relative.

My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10 million.

$250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that lost in their couch.

Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt

> value of money is quite absolute

You are conflating price and the value. I assure you that to a billionaire, $250,000 is of nearly no value at all.

The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You can call it distortion if you want.

I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.

Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.

In other words a billionaire has a distorted perception of money. Also, water is wet.

Even $50,000/yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind to just stave them off for a week.

To someone in Nigeria on 50usd per month, 1usd is a lot. To a guy earning 10k per month in California, 1 usd is nothing. Who’s distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?

Everything is relative.

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!!!

I agree, my point was that you and the author of the post seem to be in agreement. I don’t think they’re being flippant about the amount.

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.

A nonprofit is also a business. This particular one makes $11M+ a year in revenue, so in the 0.01%.

Not distorted. It’s a billionaire perspective, but it’s very real and 100% true to the billionaire. Look up the concept of marginal utility of money.