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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 6 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.079s | 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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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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1. alexey-salmin ◴[18 Sep 25 11:41 UTC] No.45288428[source]▶
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
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2. isleyaardvark ◴[18 Sep 25 12:38 UTC] No.45288882[source]▶
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
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3. alexey-salmin ◴[18 Sep 25 13:01 UTC] No.45289114[source]▶
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.

Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.

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4. zoechi ◴[18 Sep 25 13:25 UTC] No.45289413{3}[source]▶
That could be done so that it doesn't look like extortion though
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5. alexey-salmin ◴[18 Sep 25 13:40 UTC] No.45289577{4}[source]▶
Absolutely, it's just there's no commercial pressure on Salesforce company structure to evolve towards valuing the feelings of small clients.
6. giancarlostoro ◴[18 Sep 25 13:41 UTC] No.45289596[source]▶
They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.