Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.

Because microsoft would never do such a thing

I don’t think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer how sticky are these products.

With moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if desired).

Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable alternative.

Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue stream from users or they don’t want the overhead of maintaining those users.

From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.

I mean we all know Microsoft and their reputation, but they not exactly known for rising price x40 for non-profits.

Usually Microsoft was opposite: giving a lot of software for education for cheap or free to vendor lock-in people into their stack.

NOT advocating for using Teams because God please no, but Microsoft reliability us much better than Salesforce.

Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly.

And I might not like MS tech, but I never heard any stories of rug-pulls and pricing changing x10 overnight.

I will never create a new slack workspace unless forced to. Unless this non-profit is costing them more than what they were paying, I doubt this move made any business sense. And if it cost them more than 5000$ a year to support these users, there's either more to the story or Slack as a company has been heavily overvalued.

they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course

> Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly.

Absolutely not. You had your physically purchased copy of Windows and its licenses. If your org was growing a lot you might be strong-armed into paying more for the new licenses but at least you kept what you already had, nobody could take it away from you. The SaaS world is a completely different story.

Not overnight but I remember sql server licensing having a huge increase when they decided to pursue rent seeking via azure.

The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.

These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.

Yes, they fucked up -- not by charging more, but by saying "pay us 10x your annual rate within 1 week or we destroy all your data", with no notice.

Knowing that they would consider treating ANY customer that way means no other customer should use their services.

And even then (let's say 2008), if you purchased the most expensive license (Enterprise processor license) and paid for all sockets (it was calculated per socket, not per core) you could run as many SQL Server instances with as many users as you wanted on that server, in however many VMs you needed. No subscription, permanent license. You might have to purchase support extensions if you wanted ability to call MS for issues, but that's separate thing and you can ignore it if you don't need it.

O365 pretty much always includes a Teams license, so if you're paying for O365 anyway...

That was until someone decided to start strong arming people with dissenting opinions via compromised companies.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...

So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!

At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.