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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
2071 points JustSkyfall | 1 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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taegee ◴[18 Sep 25 09:06 UTC] No.45287335[source]▶
If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.

We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.

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nickjj ◴[18 Sep 25 10:23 UTC] No.45287881[source]▶
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.

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misiek08 ◴[18 Sep 25 10:49 UTC] No.45288056{3}[source]▶
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
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1. nickjj ◴[18 Sep 25 13:24 UTC] No.45289403{4}[source]▶
In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.

We did the migration in stages, basically this:

    - Provide access to Teams
    - Create all of the new teams / channels there
    - Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
    - Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
    - Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
    - Remove access to Slack
    - Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
    - Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
    - Cancel Slack subscription
In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.

We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).