Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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.

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

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.

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.

Because the calculation is that if:

N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K

Then its a profitable operation for slack.