Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?

I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.

[0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...

[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro

> Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month

This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.

> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.

those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.

Well now I'm convinced that this confusion is the root of the billing issue. Is there not a way that the clients (i.e. the students they are helping) could be added as some kind of "customer" instead of an "internal employee". If not, then yes I could see why it would be expensive.

Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.

Would make much more sense to use Discord.

Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.

Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.

>maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?

I don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.

Discord has a terrible permissions model. In Slack, anybody can create bots and channels without Workspace Admin. Slack worked best for the usecase, by far.

The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's

The issue isn't really with being moved to a higher tier of billing. Slack doesn't owe us their service for cheap forever. The problem is that we signed a contract with them earlier this year for our current rate, then suddenly today we were told that we have to pay $50k immediately or all of our 11 years of data will be deleted. That's an absurd demand. It's a shakedown

This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.

[0]: https://preventcancer.org/about-us/team/

You need to send them a legal notice asserting that. At minimum it will get you another month or two to plan your exit.

Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)

Requiring a legal notice at any point should disqualify a chat software immediately. Good on them to make the move and other users of Slack should be wary.

Perhaps there is more to the story, but my surprise about the business culture of Salesforce isn't too pronounced to be honest. Had do happen at some point in my opinion.