Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29

Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)

For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com

Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.

Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.

Hey, I think we agree on something.

Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?

If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.

We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam...

Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

this is what we're doing :)

Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented.

Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.

I believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).

You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.

You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?

I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.

The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.

Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.

But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.

That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.

Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.

And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.

I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.

I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived

When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.

We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.

Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.

I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.

The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.

Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....

Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.

In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.

On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away.

I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.

Still a dick move.

Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...

(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)

For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:

In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."

Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies

What does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?

I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.

> The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.

This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and they can migrate if it's truly necessary.

Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.

Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.

And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.

Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.

Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?

  - Zulip
  - Matrix/Synapse and Element
  - Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits

See discussions below in this HN thread.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...

[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...

It's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral paragon.

Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?

Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.

Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?

Well, you can amend a contract, but you need to send the new conditions, and it gives the other party option of not accepting the new contract, which means either amending party needs to accept continuation under old contract, or dissolution of the contractual relationship with no fees/damages/etc for the party that didn't accept new contract.

The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't even send a new contract.

Just wait till they learn about Broadcom!

Salesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s in an epic doom loop.

On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble.

Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.

Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.

Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.

People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.

This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.

Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.

We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again

The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.

I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.

Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.

This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.

The special rate was charity.

> I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.

Well, that's what you have lawyers for.

Otherwise, agreed with your comment.

>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.

I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.

Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?

Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?

You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?

Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.

You’d think they failed based on the description given earlier. But that doesn’t sound like failure to me…

You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.

Just seems more efficient to me.

> Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....

Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end?

How many more times must we see it?

When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision.

If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it.

For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.

Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.

Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.

So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).

My sales people love it.

> but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.

not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless 'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your data).

If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad.

But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.

I wouldn't mind if it comes with fish and wine. On the other hand, I believe Discord will be the next bomb for too many communities/groups out there. Or maybe after they get acquired first, either by a PE or a PE-esque corp (e.g. Salesforce, Oracle).

> But does it really matter?

I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.

And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.

Zulip is awesome too. On prem.

why the extra step of making them into PDFs?

Teams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.

Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.

Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.

This is at a fortune 500 company.

What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.

That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.

If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?

To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and schools are not offered because large companies want to be nice, but because they want to catch future customers.

I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.

Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"

It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.

Makes me filthy rich doesn’t imply I like it.

Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.

The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.

I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.

But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...

It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.

A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams.

I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.

Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.

Margin Call is a great movie.

Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P

Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers.

I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...

coders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that has worked on writing code for it hates it

I have no idea what you mean by "questionable economics" here. You seem to be saying that it seems true, but doesn't conform to your values.

And that if you don't fight it when everybody is telling you to, you end up with Bari Weiss running CBS news.

is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?

> If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?

Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."

No reasonable person can have the expectation that a discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue forever!

At this discount, it really is charity.

That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.

Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?

I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?

Depends on what you want to fight about.

If your rates were raised and you have not received new contract, if you can drop the service at that point, they can't collect including any cancellation fees.

If you want to continue using the service, that's a bit trickier.

Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.

Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.

Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.

Human readable format at rest, I assume.

The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.

But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.

So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.

Hush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to serve a simple status page.

“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”

You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?

Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?

Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?

I'm an HPC admin, I can (and will) make you serve this page from NIC's unused core. I need these cores for streaming cat videos.

Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.

Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.

Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.

There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).

Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.

As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.

Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.

Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.

That Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects) and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to be involved.

Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group.

That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema".

And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow".

End rant

I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.

Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home.

Runs Prime95 like a baws

> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.

The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.

This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.

> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it

The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.

PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.

> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.

Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.

It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.

I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.

> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack

Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?

Counterpoint though, they’re sometimes exactly what they’re described as.

Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this

We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.

Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.

There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.

It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.

Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.

One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.

Yes, that is correct.

You can create chat between any group of people that you want and then rename the chat to have a name, but that’s not a channel and it’s not a team and it doesn’t really have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files in a rudimentary way.

Except those examples are specifically and obviously not true, except maybe Larry Ellison.

I’d love a self-hostable, in-browser Access. Preferably Access 97.

In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.

We did the migration in stages, basically this:

    - Provide access to Teams
    - Create all of the new teams / channels there
    - Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
    - Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
    - Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
    - Remove access to Slack
    - Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
    - Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
    - Cancel Slack subscription

In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.

We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).

That could be done so that it doesn't look like extortion though

IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.

The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future

Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which you'd still recommend them?

Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.

> it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."

It's more a tacit admission by Slack that their pricing model can't possible work for orgs that don't match a strict employer-employee model.

Nobody would agree to pay per-seat for every customer who uses a support tool, for example (which is much closer to the model this nonprofit is operating)

There’s a couple of open source projects that get almost close but not quite. It’s like a number of them have 20 to 50% of what you need.

I agree that it would be a very useful product.

Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".

This is very well explained in the linked post.

Then they lose their 11 years of history

I hate microsoft, but I really hate slack.

Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.

Absolutely, it's just there's no commercial pressure on Salesforce company structure to evolve towards valuing the feelings of small clients.

You should sue slack.

They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.

You have a lawyer to warn you about things you might not notice in your contract. But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.

I really wonder why Discord didn’t start an enterprise offering called Concord. I’m sure there’s enough kids using it that it would get some traction.

Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.

Never used it, so I don't hate it yet.

GDPR (and similar laws, like CCPA) require companies to provide a data export when requested. Probably this could be used here?

It's very easy to describe for me. Teams is horrible in writing text, editing text, reading text, notifications. I'd rather use IRC than teams for text communication.

You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.

If every user did a gdpr request perhaps

> to Slack from Teams

They're the same thing in terms of billing and data.

Who cares? Managers just bagged fat bonus and jump ship when it goes down. The whole world is like this now /s.

That's hard on a fast deadline.

maybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.

The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.

No one is ever going to pay per-seat for tens of thousands of teenage volunteers. If you're an unusual customer (nonprofit, with lots of volunteers and program people in the slack) you might end up with a long term special deal recognizing those circumstances (charging you for employees but not others).

The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it. (Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of future decision makers instead of Discord where these users all naturally congregate was a major win!)

To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit, is messed up.

> But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.

TBH, in this specific case you don't even need to read the fine print to know that getting a $195k discount on a $200k bill is only a temporary thing!

This makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them to another piece of software.

Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.

Happy to help, did you consider https://getstream.io/chat/ ?

You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.

My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."

It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.

And yet entirely predictable.

Marc Benioff is an acolyte of Ellison, he learned and uses the same tactics.

Salesforce is in the business of forcing sales.

But they use the dreamy McConaughey for their ads, so they must be a good company. /s

Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.

The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.

If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.

That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV

Have you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?

The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building monopolistic “trusts” was avoiding “ruinous competition”, the nation would be better off with a few big monopolies