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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1720 points JustSkyfall | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.397s | source
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tomhow ◴[18 Sep 25 03:32 UTC] No.45284991[source]▶
Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.

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The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.

I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.

According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.

I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.

But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.

[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...

[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...

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SigmaEpsilonChi ◴[18 Sep 25 04:07 UTC] No.45285258[source]▶
I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.

The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).

I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.

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tomhow ◴[18 Sep 25 04:16 UTC] No.45285317[source]▶
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
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1. milkshakes ◴[18 Sep 25 04:45 UTC] No.45285514[source]▶
unless there is something going on behind the scenes, like an astroturfing signal, this seems like a pretty weak justification for the heavy handed moderation actions taken. it seems at face value like you might have killed an organic front page post attempted by a teenager trying to raise awareness and save his very cool grassroots distributed hackathon charity from an awful lot of unnecessary pain... because there "must be more to the story". i haven't ever seen anything like this on HN.
replies(1): >>45285738 #
2. tomhow ◴[18 Sep 25 05:21 UTC] No.45285738[source]▶
OK, message received, I've turned off the downweights and we'll keep it on the front page.

The intention wasn't to "kill" the story, but to try and get more details so it would address the questions that came up for me and that I assumed would come up for other readers (which indeed they have [1]). My words "must be more to the story" weren't intended to suggest Salesforce are likely to be in the right, but just that it would be helpful to know. I.e., does this affect all nonprofits/educational organizations? Is this change just targeted at this org? If so why? But I didn't know it was written by a student/teenager, who may not be on top of those details. And given it's late at night and there's such a short timeline for cutoff, we're happy to let the story stay on the front page now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284260