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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
2071 points JustSkyfall | 5 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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actionfromafar ◴[18 Sep 25 08:43 UTC] No.45287173[source]▶
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
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luckman212 ◴[18 Sep 25 10:25 UTC] No.45287894[source]▶
Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
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1. matwood ◴[18 Sep 25 11:18 UTC] No.45288236{3}[source]▶
My sales people love it.
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2. jmclnx ◴[18 Sep 25 11:40 UTC] No.45288422[source]▶
Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.

This is at a fortune 500 company.

3. duxup ◴[18 Sep 25 12:29 UTC] No.45288795[source]▶
Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?

I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?

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4. dahcryn ◴[18 Sep 25 12:42 UTC] No.45288918[source]▶
The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.

But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.

So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.

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5. trimethylpurine ◴[18 Sep 25 14:32 UTC] No.45290197{3}[source]▶
My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."

It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.