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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1502 points JustSkyfall | 7 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.056s | source | bottom
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casq ◴[18 Sep 25 04:09 UTC] No.45285280[source]▶
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

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1. pelagicAustral ◴[18 Sep 25 09:07 UTC] No.45287354[source]▶
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

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2. 48terry ◴[18 Sep 25 09:17 UTC] No.45287421[source]▶
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.
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3. pelagicAustral ◴[18 Sep 25 09:21 UTC] No.45287468[source]▶
I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.
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4. mvanbaak ◴[18 Sep 25 09:43 UTC] No.45287621{3}[source]▶
What does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?
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5. Fade_Dance ◴[18 Sep 25 10:19 UTC] No.45287849{4}[source]▶
It's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral paragon.
6. jack_pp ◴[18 Sep 25 10:52 UTC] No.45288073[source]▶
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.
7. crossroadsguy ◴[18 Sep 25 11:24 UTC] No.45288269{3}[source]▶
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).