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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
2305 points JustSkyfall | 17 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. SeanDav ◴[18 Sep 25 10:01 UTC] No.45287733[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>45288377 #>>45289905 #
2. bombcar ◴[18 Sep 25 11:35 UTC] No.45288377[source]▶
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™.
replies(2): >>45288536 #>>45288598 #
3. jeremyjh ◴[18 Sep 25 11:58 UTC] No.45288536[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>45288842 #>>45289815 #
4. tyteen4a03 ◴[18 Sep 25 12:05 UTC] No.45288598[source]▶
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...

replies(3): >>45289493 #>>45289567 #>>45291788 #
5. btbuildem ◴[18 Sep 25 12:33 UTC] No.45288842{3}[source]▶
Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.
replies(1): >>45289154 #
6. iamkeithmccoy ◴[18 Sep 25 13:04 UTC] No.45289154{4}[source]▶
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

replies(1): >>45289307 #
7. bombcar ◴[18 Sep 25 13:16 UTC] No.45289307{5}[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>45290593 #
8. elevation ◴[18 Sep 25 13:32 UTC] No.45289493{3}[source]▶
Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which you'd still recommend them?
9. abirch ◴[18 Sep 25 13:39 UTC] No.45289567{3}[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>45289714 #>>45290830 #
10. bombcar ◴[18 Sep 25 13:51 UTC] No.45289714{4}[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>45290650 #
11. rplnt ◴[18 Sep 25 14:00 UTC] No.45289815{3}[source]▶
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.
12. 6c696e7578 ◴[18 Sep 25 14:08 UTC] No.45289905[source]▶
> to Slack from Teams

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

13. MDCore ◴[18 Sep 25 15:05 UTC] No.45290593{6}[source]▶
I had a problem where it was not possible to include people from different organisations. Once you have more than one external organisation involved, I have to manage how they join and whether "external" or "guest". This makes it difficult or even impossible to set up the channel/chat with the people you want. This is entirely a Teams limitation.

Slack does not have these artificial barriers. You can invite single channel guests, or add them as full-fledged members. It's simple and logical.

14. M4rkJW ◴[18 Sep 25 15:11 UTC] No.45290650{5}[source]▶
It's quite fortuitous Discord never went down this path you've outlined. "Concord" is now a term synonymous with abject and astounding failure. "Unity" is also taken and fraught with negative associations. "Harmony" might be free.
replies(1): >>45290702 #
15. dcrazy ◴[18 Sep 25 15:14 UTC] No.45290702{6}[source]▶
“Harmony” is a line of programmable remote controls from Logitech.
16. seniorThrowaway ◴[18 Sep 25 15:25 UTC] No.45290830{4}[source]▶
yep tech is a truly revolutionary industry - it goes in circles. Once you seen the same BS cycle happen a few times it's real hard to not become jaded.
17. theossuary ◴[18 Sep 25 16:39 UTC] No.45291788{3}[source]▶
Honestly I have so many issues getting notifications on Slack. Messages go completely missed even when I have the user VIP'd, starred, notifications on, everything. I don't know what else I can do to make sure I get messages, to the point I ask people to reach out on Signal if I don't get back to them on Slack and it's at all urgent.