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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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layman51 ◴[18 Sep 25 02:50 UTC] No.45284646[source]▶
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

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1. Suppafly ◴[18 Sep 25 03:19 UTC] No.45284873[source]▶
>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.

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2. swiftcoder ◴[18 Sep 25 07:28 UTC] No.45286634[source]▶
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)