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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 4 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.998s | source
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wpm ◴[18 Sep 25 02:03 UTC] No.45284156[source]▶
I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.

It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.

Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.

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1. gregmac ◴[18 Sep 25 03:00 UTC] No.45284726[source]▶
> refuse to let them export it

Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.

You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.

Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).

But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

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2. rectang ◴[18 Sep 25 03:11 UTC] No.45284812[source]▶
I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.
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3. ◴[18 Sep 25 03:15 UTC] No.45284838[source]▶
4. gregmac ◴[18 Sep 25 05:38 UTC] No.45285851[source]▶
It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not my intent at all.

Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan -- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it. It's a harsh lesson when something this happens.

Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes (or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but you can't control what they do. You can only control your choices.