Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory.

If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.

This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.

Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.

Slack is not a VC backed service right now. It is owned in full by Salesforce.

Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea and that I agree with.

Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.

Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.

I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.

What? No? Why?

> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this

It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.

Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored.

I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.

That is insane.