Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....

https://hackclub.com/

(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)

Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here

Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.

This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in they've created.

This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.

It's really incredible, although expected.

Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.

Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.

Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.

I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.