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.

I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.

In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.

Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.

[1] https://revolt.chat/

I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.

Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.

Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.