Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

> 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.

$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.

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.

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.