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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago> $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid when you are that stupid to "happily" pay 5k a year for their chat tool, you deserve that raise to 195k
- arp242 1y agoDid you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?
- galaxy_gas 1y agoHackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Nonprofits-discount https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
- Illniyar 1y agoSo it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan. That's a different story altogether and makes more sense for the timeline involved. If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad
- Vegenoid 1y agoI can't imagine any scenario that justifies an out-of-the blue demand of $50k within a week or your data is deleted. The only way this isn't an awful thing to inflict on a teen education nonprofit is if there have been conversations happening that weren't disclosed in the post - conversations that would have illuminated this possibility. Although frankly this is a good lesson for a bunch of young hackers to learn.
- Illniyar 1y agoNot saying this is the case, or that slack thinks it is, but - If slack found out that the company isn't really a non-profit, or that it violated the requirements in the non-profit agreement (such as promoting discrimination) it would justify a demand for immediate payment in my opinion.
- dwedge 1y agoThe article says slack took them off the non profit plan, set the price at $5000/year and they paid it and were happy to. It's not a long article.
- aramsh 1y agoHack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoWhy did they switch? Given the information provided, it seems that paying anything, if you're on a grandfathered free plan, is a bad deal.
- jrochkind1 1y agoThere is no obligation to provide the "grandfathered" free plan forever, they could have taken that away too. Presumably they switched to get some features they wanted that weren't on their old plan. Slack can take away the old deal as easy as the new, staying on the old is no guarantee Slack will let you keep it forever.
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoRight - there is so much context missing. Extrapolating just a little, it looks like the story is something more like "We had too many users for our existing free plan, so we switched to a paid plan that had a first-year discount of 97%. We didn't really pay attention to the fine print, and now we've got a nasty letter demanding lots of money." Not defending Slack / Salesforce. You just can't deal with them with that level of naivety.
- jrochkind1 1y agoi don't know if your surmises are correct. But my point is just that this seems irrelevant to Slack ending the deal. If they had stayed on the existing "grandfathered" plan, Slack could still be ending it. So I don't see the relevance. There's no reason to think they would be safer if they had stayed on a "grandfathered" plan that isn't even offered anymore, in fact it's often safer to switch to a currently offered plan if they're offering you a reasonable one, figuring they'll end the grandfathered one sooner than a currently offered one. That alone could be reason to switch in fact.
- sadeshmukh 1y agoIt was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and there was a special contract drawn with HC (that's the 5000/yr mentioned in the original post).
- altairprime 1y agoThis is remarkably familiar.
- drowntoge 1y agoDo not use Slack.
- mrweasel 1y agoA few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst. But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use. The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised? IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.
- jrochkind1 1y agoI think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just "tricked" into thinking this.
- jama211 1y agoWell said, it’s a red flag for me if someone both states that they “can’t understand what others like about [thing]” AND then assumes that means they’ve been tricked or they’re stupid or sheep or something else… it’s like, other people having completely reasonable reasons that you just don’t happen to know what they are couldn’t possibly be a possibility. It’s an ego thing I suspect.
- lokimedes 1y agoPlease consider IRC or something open protocol instead.
- sjapkee 1y ago$200k for chat is insane. Even $5k for chat is insane
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rowanG077 1y agoI love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale. I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
- DangitBobby 1y agoIt's pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.
- pcl 1y agoThat seems like a pretty tough argument to make, to be honest.
- DangitBobby 1y agoNo, not really. The features that distinguish between feudalism and capitalism are mostly to do with class mobility and hierachies. Capitalism without class mobility is indistinguishable from feudalism. All it takes is a couple of generations of unchecked markets and power accumulates completely in upper classes and we are back to feudalism. You can argue "no, because reasons" (paraphrasing) all you want. Good luck convincing me, though.
- pcl 1y ago> Good luck convincing me, though. Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll pass.
- nextworddev 1y agoFirst time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article
- murukesh_s 1y agoWe replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack
- getpokedagain 1y agoSo is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency
- dinkleberg 1y agoYou can self-host Mattermost. It seems that is likely what they are going to be doing from the article since they talked about how important it is to own your data.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoIt always felt weird to me that glorified IRC could command such a price premium. Admittedly, a bunch of engineering was put in place to make things work, but it was still just humans chatting with each other for what is probably tiny amounts of data storage.
- temptemptemp111 1y ago[dead]
- htrp 1y agoSlack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force migration.
- lysace 1y agoHasn’t Slack had per user pricing for a very long time? And wasn’t the free version made kind of unusable through very limited retention like a decade ago?
- m3kw9 1y agothe extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going
- giveita 1y agoAt a 2.5% success rate this breaks even
- boxerab 1y agoTime to switch to Mattermost.
- kfogel 1y agoSo many stories like this about Slack. We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
- amarant 1y agoUnless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet. At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over. I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too
- davidcollantes 1y agoSee: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- burkaman 1y agoIt is open source and you can self host it.
- sweettea 1y agoIt's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/ https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
- amarant 1y agoOh, so I was missing something! That was not very obvious from their landing page! Well in that case, carry on!
- wpm 1y agoI can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up. It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you. Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.
- ainiriand 1y agoSeriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
- baq 1y agoOnly if sysadmin time is $0/h. I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
- pessimizer 1y agoMost of this stuff runs on autopilot once it's set up, which is why these companies have such huge margins. That rounding error in accounting is also a monthly charge, and it sometimes happens that you get a spontaneous demand for $50K in a week and $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the world, and a sysadmin to manage it.
- micw 1y agoI prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
- leoh 1y ago
- armada651 1y ago> a pretty massive sum of money I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.
- andrewstuart2 1y agoIt's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can afford it (or borrow it).
- armada651 1y agoI'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech. However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
- amarant 1y agoEverything is relative. My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10 million. $250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that lost in their couch. Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt
- stouset 1y ago> value of money is quite absolute You are conflating price and the value. I assure you that to a billionaire, $250,000 is of nearly no value at all.
- 1y ago
- cozzyd 1y agoIf they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
- dmbche 1y agoSet it up earlier than late, if you're expecting 7 days notice before deletion
- hopelite 1y agoFrankly, not having an alternative identified for all hosted corporate services and maybe even at the ready with regularly maintained deployment and transition plans is and long has been reckless at this point. Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion. Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoThat seems an unreasonable bar for all services. Even if you have identified say, Gogs to replace your Github instance, there are so many practical realities of porting a large installation that your simulacra instance is offering nothing.
- leoh 1y agoI'd get off ASAP.
- prng2021 1y ago[flagged]
- blantonl 1y agoI agree. If this was Oracle I might not have too difficult of a time believing this is all of the story. But I do think in this case there is more to the story.
- ivewonyoung 1y agoDid you miss this news? > Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, reducing staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees · CEO Marc Benioff linked layoffs to AI automating...
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoI am willing to believe these things do happen. Different vendor, but I have experienced a price jumping 3x with one month notice before the annual renewal.
- sadeshmukh 1y agoIt did happen, at least from the perspective of a one year member. We had zero warning, and even core staff were caught off guard. Our migration basically began now.
- Spivak 1y agoI genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and getting nothing. Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
- nkrisc 1y agoAgreed, it's bizarre. $5,000/yr > $0/yr. There's no way the operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000/yr.
- LunaSea 1y agoBecause the calculation is that if: N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K Then its a profitable operation for slack.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoMaybe they were running the math expecting that the customer would bail before the year renewal, but would pay the short term extortion to migrate their data. $50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy
- rchaud 1y agoThey're not an independent business, their pricing is probably decided by Salesforce. It's probably bundled in free for Salesforce customers who buy a minimum of X seats.
- omcnoe 1y agoIt's a sign of a really poor decision making process. They were currently being paid some amount, and got their product in front of the next generation of Software Engineers. People who hopefully will like the product, and grow up to evangelize it in their workplace. Instead now, they'll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can't afford the new price) and they won't get their product in front of those students. See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early/mid 2000's by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling/documentation.
- junar 1y agoI really wish this post had more details. How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing? If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoAre there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.
- junar 1y agoWhat I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more interesting to me than a story with fewer ones. They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
- edoceo 1y agoMy teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst case we're reading directly from the PG database.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 1y agoWe'll let you know how we like Mattermost once we've had a chance to actually use it :')
- jacobr1 1y agoAlmost certainly an organizational failure. Salesforce, despite its many faults, has had good non profit programs for many years. They also tend to have procedures about notification for renewals and account managers to discuss terms and the like. Some automated process or internal person with enough context made a mistake. A jump like that should have required direct outreach and phone call to see what can be discussed. It doesn't seem like saleforce has some kind of policy shift to charge maximum rates to non profits. Elsewhere in this thread it seems like this organization had some kind of special one-off deal to handle the case they had a number number of non-employee users. The slack billing model doesn't seem to work for "communities" but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn't just suddenly drop it with limited notice. Thus my contention is the specifics of the special deal where lost in some form of automation or lower-level employees actions following a standard playbook.
- flunhat 1y agoFor whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x). A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy. [1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai
- delfinom 1y agoIt's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.
- tomrod 1y agoI mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.
- MontyCarloHall 1y agoIt's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products. [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-says-he-cut-4-000-support-roles-because-of-ai https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce... [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-artificial-intelligence-for-half-workload-marc-benioff https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
- paxys 1y agoSalesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.
- randyrand 1y agoWow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?
- artursapek 1y agoBig soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
- cj 1y agoThe application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.
- userbinator 1y agoIMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
- edoceo 1y agoYes. If you use Slack, make your own archive. I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't. For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing. Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415
- leoh 1y agoMan, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.
- thiagoperes 1y agoWe’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.
- jayknight 1y agoTeams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.
- mdorazio 1y agoChat? No. But the strength of Teams is that it lets you do everything else you want in an integrated communications app - voice, video calls, calendars, viewing (and editing) documents, etc. At a reasonable price that Microsoft isn't going to crank to the moon.
- s0sa 1y agoSo instead of doing one thing well, it does a bunch of things poorly?
- tuesdaynight 1y agoI had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using Teams was a daily battle.
- margalabargala 1y agoWhat are your experienced differences? Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.
- zhivota 1y ago
- nextworddev 1y agoIs it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?
- scooter_y 1y agoyep! Hard, but possible.
- realityfactchex 1y agoSince you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool. Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1]. Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool? Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS. [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) [1] https://zulip.com
- novatea 1y agoI'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things though.
- mobilemidget 1y agoDoes give you more things to 'hack' for the club. Not all bad I guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some 'new projects'.
- _zoltan_ 1y agomattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
- Freak_NL 1y agoIs it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a sensible manner). Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made with regards to our tools.
- wltr 1y agoWhat about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?
- djmips 1y agoMake your own Slack?
- yuvguy 1y agogreat article and I really hope that hack club continues on without slack, and maybe even do better.
- fn-mote 1y agoI 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/ 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.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aramsh 1y agoFYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
- michabyte 1y agoHi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chrisasquith 1y agoHi! 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
- ugh123 1y agoHave you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
- donatj 1y ago> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned. Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud. For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
- tomrod 1y ago$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.
- sadeshmukh 1y agoWe use a lot of Slack specific features, especially bots, and it's more of a pain to move thousands of users and channels than to just pay up.
- varenc 1y agoDoesn't an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it's migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.
- belthesar 1y agoThis doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.
- varenc 1y agoI did not know about IRCv3! These are the HN insights I love. I wonder if IRCv3 is still semi-usable from a raw telnet session like old IRC is? I remember using that in the early 2000s when I wanted to get on IRC but didn't have a real client.
- jppope 1y agoI totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough. To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something. The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.
- komali2 1y agoCory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.
- novatea 1y agoAnother Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
- lazystar 1y agowelcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry
- elnerd 1y agoGetting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need. It happens, but should not be in the curriculum for kids. I am sure that being forced to spend time on this steals time from more interesting projects.
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoSkyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.
- p-t 1y agoThis is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoInformed of the final cut-off date, sure! How long have they had the bill mentioned in the top comment on this post? At the very least it's 3 weeks, and the comment suggests it is months.
- rr808 1y agoCampfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.
- giveita 1y agoCan obe simply export all the data and dump that in Dropbox (for interim). Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no lost data that way.
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- freediver 1y agoWe are using a hosted Zulip instance for company chats at Kagi, not just to prevent scenarios like this but also for data privacy reasons.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ThinkBeat 1y agoIf you are going the way to self-host it so you own all your won data. all you have to do is run mattermost in production on hardware you control at 99.9% Or 80% or whatever uptime is deemed necessary. Or you can use an out of the box host, but then your data is not in your direct control.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- robotburrito 1y agoJoin us now and share the software. You’ll be free.
- sciencesama 1y agoThis when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible software !
- system2 1y agoI pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don't need to be "cutting edge" all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.
- layman51 1y agoThere must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance? I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me. [0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-Policy#how-youre-billed https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin... [1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro https://slack.com/pricing/pro
- creativeSlumber 1y ago> Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible. > then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me. those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.
- layman51 1y agoWell now I'm convinced that this confusion is the root of the billing issue. Is there not a way that the clients (i.e. the students they are helping) could be added as some kind of "customer" instead of an "internal employee". If not, then yes I could see why it would be expensive.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 1y agoThe issue isn't really with being moved to a higher tier of billing. Slack doesn't owe us their service for cheap forever. The problem is that we signed a contract with them earlier this year for our current rate, then suddenly today we were told that we have to pay $50k immediately or all of our 11 years of data will be deleted. That's an absurd demand. It's a shakedown
- kragen 1y agoSlack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups. You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them. When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
- dwedge 1y agoI was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them. They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff. I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI
- chaboud 1y agoThat sounds quite a bit like fraud.
- nottorp 1y agoPretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.
- wongarsu 1y agoThey are verifiably false statements made for the purpose of monetary gain. I guess the question would hinge on intent: did they just forget to check if anyone is using those features and if there is anyone who would be disrupted, or are they intentionally deceiving users by purposefully not checking?
- cmckn 1y agoI’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812908499 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812... In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.
- sqs 1y agoIt's a big organization of teen coders who build really cool things together. Instead of coding alone, they get to hack on software and hardware projects in person and online with other smart teens all around the world. You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)
- cmckn 1y agoSounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this headache.
- scooter_y 1y agoI'm a hack clubber who is extremely active and has sent over 55K messages in the slack (talk about insanity!). I've been part of Hack Club for about 3 years now, and it's changed my life in ways you couldn't have imagined. Porting over from Slack is super stressful for me + all of the HC staff having to pull all-nighters for the next week :). Hopefully this can all be figured out, and we can finally have a proper FOSS software to allow for lots of additions via PR's! Also, all the finances are available too at hcb.hackclub.com/hq (guess what, this is 99% coded by teenagers too, and open source... woah).
- casq 1y agoHi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of all the groups that we sponsor. Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.
- hkt 1y agoPSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.
- okcoder1 1y agoIRC would not be useful for Hack Club as it's only text. Hack Club requires software that allows us to upload images, create canvases and most importantly, call with others.
- buovjaga 1y agoNot saying there's a turnkey solution at the moment for your exact needs, but even with your current $5k/year budget something interesting could be built with the "modern IRC stack" that https://irctoday.com/ https://irctoday.com/ uses, for example. Call support would have to be done by integrating Jitsi, but it's been done before as seen in https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference and https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support
- DarkmSparks 1y agoThe fact they think they can charge this much tells me that there is a lot of room for competition in the webguis for irc space. Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till February but this would make a nice Christmas project.
- buovjaga 1y agoNew projects in that genre keep popping up, for example eIRC: An Enterprise Chat System Based on IRC https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
- joshmlewis 1y agoIt's also not a coincidence that Slack is neutering the ability to access channel history via the API very soon. With a very generous rate limit of 2 requests per minute I believe it was and a max of ~10 messages. This is already enforced for new marketplace apps and will apply to all apps starting in March according to their docs.
- donperignon 1y agoAnd archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace… very aggressive move to destroy free and non enterprise tier
- _kidlike 1y agowhat kind of joke is this...
- xavxav 1y agoI'm surprised GDPR has nothing to say about this. You should have the right to your data, but I suppose that doesn't extend to companies?
- scrollaway 1y agoIt does to some extent, because companies have to respect gdpr for their own users as well: so individual employees/slack users have gdpr rights and they individually can get those enforced against the slack operators.
- flipbrad 1y agoEU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to roll out.
- freehorse 1y agoSlack claims to be data processor, not data controller [0]. The workspace admins are, ironically, considered by slack to be data controllers, so GDPR-related requests are supposed to be handled by them. This is ironic though, as in the Pro plan they do not offer options to admins to download everything (eg DMs). So as an EU citizen I cannot request all my data, but technically it is the data controller who is responsible for it here (my workspace admin). Not sure how that would fly if somebody took the effort to seriously look into it though. Also not sure how easy it is for an admin to download and provide me even my data from the public channels in the first place with the current tools. I am pretty sure there is no GDPR compliance overall, but it is probably not trivial to get slack actually accountable for it. PS It seems the workspace owner has to contact slack about it, and this is for both free and pro plan where downloading direct messages/private channels is not an option by default. [1] [0] https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy > In general, Customer is the controller of Customer Data. In general, Slack is the processor of Customer Data and the controller of Other Information. [1] https://slack.com/help/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-import-and-export-tools https://slack.com/help/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-imp...
- raffy 1y agoSlack doesn't even have a functional input field.
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoi wish discord worked better for work
- arrty88 1y agoThat’s salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.
- nikcub 1y agoThere are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0]. One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why. Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_price_35_increase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
- rKarpinski 1y ago> the company started as the anti-Oracle. The company was founded by an Oracle executive...
- worthless-trash 1y agoI mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they want to mow lawns.
- JdeBP 1y agoFor the young people who might be reading this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
- qrobit 1y agoAs a younger person myself, this talk is incredibly entertaining, kind of eye-opening too; the passion for engineering that speaker radiates is immeasurable.
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoMy first thought was had this moved the stock price - but the day price is up. The 5Y price is back to where it was ... over all they're still 6000% up.
- charlieyu1 1y agoS&P 500 up 3x in 5Y so back to same level isn’t great I guess stock price is a reflection of crap management which in return leads to these behaviours. Maybe I should check the stock price first before deciding on a product.
- tomhow 1y agoEdit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page. == The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change. I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything. According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details. I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize. But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light. [1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Charities-discount https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f... [2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Education-discount https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...
- novatea 1y agoHack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.
- tomhow 1y agoYes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we really don't know much at all.
- dbg31415 1y agoLots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers! https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/
- imarkphillips 1y agoWe switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more consistency.
- casq 1y agoHi, 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
- p_l 1y agoIsn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?
- lelanthran 1y agoWe don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause. Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar. I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document. The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.
- mkhalil 1y agoUnpopular opinion: I think it's wild that ANY ORG would pay $200k for a chat app. If I ever ran an org that needed a chat app and the costs came even close to $200k a year, I would rather hire an engineer, contract a designer, and create our own, or more likely, contribute/fork an open source project like Matrix; providing us with the ability to *really* integrate it into our company/tools - as oppose spending it on IRC+ for "good enough" integration. PLUS ... our data stays on under our control.
- donperignon 1y agoNot unpopular at all. That’s the way
- BizarroLand 1y agoI would say and non-profit. For a larger company like, idk, AT&T or IBM or Goldman and Sachs, $200k/yr would be cheap to handle all of the internal chat.
- vjeux 1y agoWe had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.
- quietfox 1y agoLet's revisit this assessment in a few years.
- keithnz 1y agowe've been using discord for years, it's great. Its model for making money is different, its primary market is gamers. Servers are content for their users to consume and they charge the users directly.
- quietfox 1y agoI'm a Discord user myself, in private as well in job context. But we all have been here long enough to know that the only reliable constant is change.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoWe're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version). I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?
- moi2388 1y agohttps://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- jwrallie 1y agoI was considering moving from Slack (free version) to Teams (paid) for a new project starting in October because my workplace already have a license for that. Seems like it will have less features but no 90 day retention annoyances. You seem to have some experience with both, do you think I am making a bad decision for a ~30 person team? Others suggested Matrix, but I have a feeling they are implicitly assuming self-hosting. I do think Element works quite well, but I have only used it personally with matrix.org for basic chat, never for work. It does work on both Android and iOS as well as Linux, which is why I use it.
- jasonfrost 1y agoIf you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service
- happymellon 1y agoStrongly disagree. It is NOT a good place to share docs. Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed. The calls are fine though, and the chat is substandard. A bunch of teams use it for support channels, however there doesn't appear to be a way to join the group for support without being pinged by @channel_name. So you join for support and then you are alerted by everyone else who is looking for support. At least they have stopped fucking around with "newest on top/bottom", there was A/B testing last year (or maybe the year before) and you couldn't tell which way you had to scroll from one day to the next.
- moi2388 1y agoI personally would’ve gone for matrix since it’s free and open source, but I’m sure this license will be better..
- aitchnyu 1y agoWhat "years of institutional knowledge" does Hack Club and others have in Slack? I assume anything more than a week old to be unsearchable. In fact I want chats older than 1 week to be deleted so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
- sadeshmukh 1y agoWe extensively use Canvases, as well as pinned messages and message links to reference others. As in, I often need to look at older messages, very occasionally years old, but usually within the month.
- wredcoll 1y ago> so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki. Weirdly this part never actually happens.
- accrual 1y agoThere are a few rare folks that love writing wiki pages, the catch is getting one on the team.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoOne isn’t enough (ask me how I know) unless they are involved in everything.
- lazystar 1y agomy favorite part of joining a new team is reading old merge requests and tickets that have a summary of "the reason is based this slack conversation" and then have a link to a slack conversation from a year ago... in an org that deletes slack chats older than 1 year.
- wredcoll 1y agoI mean, yeah, but frankly the link to a source is a big step up from someplaces. Its a culture thing.
- matthewaveryusa 1y agoFor those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl). Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work. The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open. For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile
- darkamaul 1y agoI can’t really comment on video calls in Matrix since I never used them in Slack either. For me the main draw is having one tool that does one job well, rather than trying to be the all-in-one hub for everything. I’d rather have messaging in one place, email wherever it lives, and video calls on a separate tool that’s actually good at that, instead of relying on a centralized system that tries to cover all bases but ends up being mediocre at most of them.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoIt has been a year or two since I used Slack heavily, but when I did the video calls were unreliable and poor. Maybe it has improved since then.
- jwrallie 1y agoAround a year ago I could do calls reliably on it, but recently I have been having a bad experience, I am not sure what changed.
- Arathorn 1y agoAre you having these problems on Element X or Element Classic (the old mobile app, which is in maintenance mode?) (Element Classic used a mix of legacy Matrix voip calling for 1:1 and Jitsi for group calling; Element X has switched to native MatrixRTC (Element Call) for E2EE for both 1:1 and group, but is technically still beta as we’re still finishing the 1:1 UX. On Android, notifications are a known problem on Element X Android but if you give the app total permission to run in the background they should work.)
- spamjavalin 1y agoPretty amazing considering slack is just irc
- okcoder1 1y agoHi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack. We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc. Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoGood news and good luck with that, hopefully Mattermost will behave better. Make sure to warn others of Slack/Salesforce, customers need to have a voice and this behavior must become prohibitly expensive for Salesforce.
- SadTrombone 1y agoNot sure if you saw this, but another user pointed out that Mattermost is moving to limit self-hosted instances to 1,000 users: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitations-on-user-count-mattermost-community-version/11580/5 https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
- Zekio 1y agothere exists a fork that is basically limitless https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter so if that ever becomes a problem you just swap server binary
- coder543 1y agoA fork that has not been touched in at least 7 months does not inspire confidence, especially when the mobile apps depend on the server staying up to date.
- SadTrombone 1y agoLooks like the releases are pretty up-to-date: https://packages.framasoft.org/projects/mostlymatter/ https://packages.framasoft.org/projects/mostlymatter/
- okcoder1 1y agoLooks like we're moving to Mattermost!
- joshu 1y agowe built a tool on slack for communities and companies, and then did some outreach to community leaders about trying it out. they almost universally said that they hated being captive to slack and wanted to transition away.
- rollulus 1y ago“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.
- irfn 1y agoIndeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoA large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.
- pxeboot 1y agoVMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoNo. Also VMWare moved perpetual licenses to subscriptions, not the other way around.
- nicce 1y agoProton did this without warning with their upgrade coupons back in day. Still salty.
- dismalaf 1y agoIt's Salesforce... This is why I use open source or buy services based more on the company than the product itself... Not a fan of rug-pulls...
- sneak 1y agoThat’s not what extortion means.
- apatheticonion 1y agoBring back IRC lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stroebs 1y agoClassic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.
- jonplackett 1y agoYeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Can’t imagine there’s many people still left using it now.
- mrroryflint 1y agoHundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet it’s a downward trend with no hope of a turnaround.
- jorisboris 1y agoI still have old personal projects on there Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over
- wereHamster 1y agoWe just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago. Good riddance.
- gregsadetsky 1y agowhat did you migrate to?
- TuringNYC 1y agoNot OP, but we originally migrated to Digital Ocean. But now, all complex stuff is on AWS and dual-stack stuff is on Replit.
- gregsadetsky 1y agoand what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting env vars to replicate the heroku features? also, you used replit for the frontend deployment? or frontend and some backend? thanks - just super interesting as I'm in the space and feedback/real cases are really useful
- Hobadee 1y agoThis isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.
- beezlewax 1y agoBecause microsoft would never do such a thing
- Robelius 1y agoI don’t think anyone is making that claim. But when it comes down to switching cost + recurring costs, people are starting to answer how sticky are these products.
- ivell 1y agoWith moving to Azure and other MS tech, I am seeing companies consolidating their IT to mainly a single vendor. This is going to be a very risky situation, with MS having significant leverage over companies (in some cases ability to bankrupt the company if desired).
- SXX 1y agoMillions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly. And I might not like MS tech, but I never heard any stories of rug-pulls and pricing changing x10 overnight.
- darkwater 1y ago> Millions of businesses were also running single-vendor on Microsoft two decades ago back when they been much larger monopoly. Absolutely not. You had your physically purchased copy of Windows and its licenses. If your org was growing a lot you might be strong-armed into paying more for the new licenses but at least you kept what you already had, nobody could take it away from you. The SaaS world is a completely different story.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- skirge 1y agoexpensive IRC with history
- bigyabai 1y agoNowadays even the history ain't a feature...
- jbrooks84 1y agoWelcome to Microsoft Teams
- fredrikgangso 1y agoSad to read, but I also got inspiring.
- sneak 1y agoNote that Mattermost is fake open source cosplay, and keeps important features in their non-foss application. If you want these table stakes features (like SSO or message expiry) you’ll find yourself maintaining your own fork or janky scaffolding (I have cronjobs that run SQL directly against the db). They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their proprietary enterprise software product. It’s still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
- olavgg 1y agoMattermost is open source, but the licensing is complex and full of bullshit. It is not a community driven project. Once you have installed the self hosted solution, you get a user interface that asks you to upgrade to the enterprise edition in every corner and menu. A self hosted version is better than nothing though.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoMattermost is fully licensed under AGPLv3 terms, and portions can be used under Apache 2 terms as well. I'm not sure why people would say they're not open source. It's true there's no community-led edition, but that's because no one has taken the initiative to create one yet.
- sneak 1y agoWrong. Mattermost is dual licensed with proprietary licenses, requiring a CLA to contribute. Additionally another thing called Mattermost, made by the same people, isn’t open source at all, under any free software license.
- v3ss0n 1y agoZulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
- bfelbo 1y agoWould love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.
- reeredfdfdf 1y agoAt my work we use Zulip, and I haven't really found many people complaining about it. At least on iOS works just fine for me.
- jacinda 1y agoI would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved. We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
- porker 1y agoWe found worse mobile apps was good because it put boundaries around our interactions and kept us using it in a focused way during work hours.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThe Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.
- gschizas 1y agoI set up Mattermost as a quick-and-dirty alternative, Zulip seemed a bit too hard to setup under pressure. I'm willing to give it a try again though.
- menzoic 1y agoWhy does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?
- andy_ppp 1y agoHonestly, I did not know Salesforce had bought Slack. I would encourage everyone here to avoid that company - their business model seems to be create a spiderweb of critical touch points within an organisation and its data then suddenly hike prices. Certainly in this case but I’ve heard it happen with other products too.
- anonzzzies 1y agoFrom Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher well.
- nodar86 1y agoHey! I have an open-source project for browsing an exported slack archive, it may be useful to you so you can see and search the history: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :) A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
- preisschild 1y agoMattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/migrate-from-slack.html https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...
- danielheath 1y agoI have been running a Mattermost instance with a few thousand users for years now. It really hasn’t required any maintenance at all beyond incrementing the version number. They are starting to tighten the screws (showing admins a warning if you have over 2500 users), but it’s still looking good for a few years before I need to act on that.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoNotably, Mattermost can be forked to a community edition if the team behind it does anything too user-hostile. It's a fine balance for them to keep their "team edition" nudging users to a supported edition without being so annoying that users are motivated to make that community edition. I have other reasons to want a community edition personally, but sadly they've been successful enough thus far that there isn't enough interest from other developers to make it happen.
- danielheath 1y agoForking involves: * Fork the server (adjust your CI / build / deploy pipeline) * Run your own push notification broker * Fork the iOS client, white-label it, point it at your push server * Setup apple dev account to publish * Fork the android client, white-label it, point it at your push server * Setup google dev account to publish * Fork the frontend repo, edit to match the white-labelled apps
- jillesvangurp 1y agoWe're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't lose it (Google drive mainly). And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff. Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
- swiftcoder 1y ago> And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution It's uh... not good? I have one client that uses it, and it's just painful. Threading doesn't work well, notifications are hard to configure, rich text entry is subtly broken...
- trippsydrippsy 1y ago[dead]
- tonyhart7 1y agothis is bad but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
- thepancake 1y agoNothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.
- ggm 1y agoI have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very responsive as backend support. I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely. IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available. I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
- jacinda 1y ago+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic. Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizations/zulip https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
- thetridentguy 1y agoI believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.
- IshKebab 1y agoMattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.
- sundarurfriend 1y agoWhen was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.
- lenbot7 1y agoAs a member of the hack club slack, to update you all, we have been backing up absolutely everything and going as quick as we can
- gethly 1y agoNo sane person should pay even those $5k a year for a STUPID CHAT APP!!! It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own shit for $5 a month, FFS!
- s20n 1y agoPersonally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative. There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman <https://stallman.org/slack.html https://stallman.org/slack.html>
- m-schuetz 1y agoConvenience is king, and unfortunately Matrix is not very convenient. Way too cumbersome to get going from a user perspective.
- integricho 1y agoSlack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.
- mrroryflint 1y agoI am fairly indifferent to Slack - I have to use it for work. But our experiences seem so vastly different: - UI is, with the exception of large media, snappy and pretty native feeling - no jumps (that I can recall) The mobile app is okayish though its offline indication and notifications are a bit frustrating. What machine are you running it on?
- integricho 1y agoNot sure if it might be related to specific instances, i.e. large organizations with hundreds of channels, etc like in my case... still, my workstation is pretty beefy, threadripper pro 7985wx, 256GB RAM, RTX 4080 (and this is no software issue, as other, much more resource intensive apps run just fine)... though slack is unmistakably sluggish, to the point of me being frustrated enough with it to complain about it here :) just hate it.
- mrroryflint 1y agoYeah I mean - that machine isn't going to struggle with much! I'm on an M1 Mac and it's pretty smooth. Of course, maybe I just have terribly low standards.
- trashymctrash 1y agonever used the web app, but never noticed any sluggishness with the desktop app. now my company „forces“ me to us Microsoft Teams and i’m thinking back to the good old days with Slack.
- integricho 1y ago
- PHGamer 1y agoshould just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
- preisschild 1y agoJust more of the same No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
- Cort3z 1y agoIt is free, as I understand it, not 200k per year.
- LunaSea 1y agoIt is free, for now.
- euLh7SM5HDFY 1y agoIt already gives kinda creepy "You use this server, why not support it … or else" vibe all over interface.
- netsharc 1y agoHow about not relying on a third party for your organization...
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoYou could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage chat for just this amount of money
- hosh 1y agoOr an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoThe cloud is other people's computers.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoNobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing. Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
- lordnacho 1y agoWhat are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting. I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service. If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- danieldisu 1y agoI spend around 30%, if not more of my work time on Slack (collaborating with others, solving customer issues, searching, documenting) I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like (Teams, IRC etc) As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best keyboard etc Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is "best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of communication tools I think the difference is huge. Is this needed to do my work? nope It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes
- ThePhysicist 1y agoPeople with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a company, and I find it not great if people complain about such minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks, frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.
- pmontra 1y agoTLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."
- Cort3z 1y agoWonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.
- Izmaki 1y agoTell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform that the teens and kids already use: Discord.
- anonzzzies 1y agoNot open either, so that'll go the same way in the end. People will want more money no? Or get bought and then the buyers want more money... Pick something open and self hosted OR that at least allows you to move everything and tinker with it yourself when (not if) the company becomes evilll.
- mixcocam 1y agoMailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need). All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
- scrollaway 1y agoThis type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else. You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience is. Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication. Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
- mixcocam 1y agoI'm sorry that you read my comment as "tone deaf". It was not my intention. > This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. I don't see how a comment which proposes a solution to the problem at hand can be "selfish". I am the owner of a small business myself and am well aware of what switching tools requires. I'm also sorry that you think that modern tools like Slack or Mattermost for that matter improve communication over what email provides; then again that is obviously a matter of opinion. > “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else. The article is about a simple yet painful problem. I am proposing a solution, I don't see how my comment is not pertinent. As for my use of the word "just", simple does not mean easy. > Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication. > > Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment? False dichotomy. I truly believe that mailing lists are a great way to collaborate. Especially given the case that data ownership is now even more important to the author of the post. Slack/Mattermost try to combine real-time chat with asynchronous information exchange. I think that that is not a great way to work, this is close enough to what I think of these solutions to [link to](https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems). Not only that but your data will always be locked away in their non-standard format. Moreover, I emailed the author (good thing this "clunky" system exists), and offered help with a potential switch to using email. Thank you nonetheless for taking my comment into consideration. I can only hope it was more useful for other readers than it was for you.
- Havoc 1y ago> Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? That’s some big city mobster tactics right there
- tossandthrow 1y agoSlack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad. Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects. When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.
- dominicrose 1y agoWe've been using Mattermost for so long I don't know what happened to Slack but the fact that they can't keep their customers is not really an issue as long as we have similar software available for a more just cost or self-hostable. This type of app isn't supposed to hold data. At least in my opinion, Slack is more for instant messaging and e-mail for tracing.
- redserk 1y agoIf you’re going to spend the effort to rewrite your chat conversations back into email, you might as well throw those summaries into a wiki or other documentation system..
- YetAnotherNick 1y agoThis is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.
- tossandthrow 1y agoYou are right, but when self hosting you do have a bit more leverage - such as not being rug-pulled by the SaaS provider before having gone through arbitration. Organizations need to realize that being right does not matter if you are dead.
- YetAnotherNick 1y agoSelf hosting makes this situation even worse(see recent VMware stories), as they can quote anything or have different price for the exact piece of hardware or something. SaaS at least has uniformity in price of what they offer and the price for new users and existing users can't be very different.
- anonzzzies 1y agoMove to Zulip already...
- tux3 1y agoThat's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory. If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack. This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
- timeon 1y agoWas not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.
- scrollaway 1y agoSlack is not a VC backed service right now. It is owned in full by Salesforce. Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea and that I agree with.
- Barbing 1y agoThanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoShould be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
- dijit 1y agoWhat? No? Why?
- bluecheese452 1y agoThat is insane.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago[flagged]
- skylurk 1y agoWhat does grief have to do with it?
- fch42 1y agowhy would you not be sad about something great you lost ? Even if it was "just a freebie" ?
- hosh 1y agoThe non-profit is still in crises mode and can use help. The grief and reflection can come when the crises has passed. Whether it is grief or not, how is describing these stages of grief helpful for the situation as it is right now?
- fch42 1y agoOnly in the sense of (helping to) "move on". When you find yourself at the receiving end of monopoly extortion (at least as it appears to you), then best do what you can to get away. It seems they are on that path now.
- hosh 1y agoAnd they are already migrating things to Mattermost. So again, how does talking about the stages of grief help?
- nusl 1y agoYears of time, effort, and love poured into something that's being pulled out from under you? Surely you're able to feel some empathy for the situation
- nusl 1y ago
- KronisLV 1y ago> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too. Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though. Meanwhile, did a bit of a test drive in my org with Mattermost, devs were mostly okay with it, but it was decided from top down to go with Teams instead. Wonder how that will work out in the next decade.
- blef 1y agoI guess history repeat.
- aMadMan 1y ago<nelson>Ha-Ha!</nelson> That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first place....
- matt-p 1y agoDo you mind me asking if you'll be self hosting mattermost? If so they're moving to a 1000 User hard limit for self hosted instances. https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitations-on-user-count-mattermost-community-version/11580/5 https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
- Tepix 1y agoThat discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"
- matt-p 1y agoYes, I mean they are not difficult to remove, but I think it would be fair to add the context that they're going to have to fork it. E.g open source is not a panacea either, they will likely also struggle with postgres being a bottleneck for that number of users (particularly on search), the redis integration is not part of open core.
- matt-p 1y agoIt also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may 2024 ? https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own fork.
- dzaima 1y agoThere is newer action on version tags: https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter/-/commits/release-10.12.0?ref_type=heads https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter/-/comm... (10.12 seeming to be the latest mattermost version, so fully up-to-date)
- matt-p 1y agoSeems like they've gone past even their own '1000' users. In v11 it's a cap of 250 users! They're also rapidly removing features for team too. - User limits were lowered to final threshold of 250 for Mattermost Team Edition - GitLab SSO has been deprecated from Team Edition. - Playbooks has stopped working for Team Edition. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. What's happening on the hosted side of things? Ah; - Introduced support for Mattermost Entry Edition with message history limits.
- ctm92 1y agoSlack is doing questinonable things anyways. When we migrated away from it to Teams, I wanted to export the workspace to be able to look stuff up in case we need it. We are a very small company and had the smallest plan, no chance, export only with the expensive plan. Since I'm located in europe, I thought of just doing a data request based on GDPR (at least for my messages). They declined it and referred me to my organization, since we are in charge of fulfilling such requests (how would we even do that if there's no functionality for it?). Absolutely ridiculous.
- actionfromafar 1y agoThousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
- ecocentrik 1y agoSome of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.
- dotancohen 1y agoThough maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.
- actionfromafar 1y agoHey, I think we agree on something.
- amelius 1y agoYes, they earned their Stallman degree.
- mihaaly 1y agoI believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
- safety1st 1y agoYou would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter? I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism. The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in. Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else. But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now. That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process. Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is. And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
- pelagicAustral 1y agoI think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam... Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
- 48terry 1y agoYou're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.
- pelagicAustral 1y agoI would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.
- mvanbaak 1y agoWhat does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?
- Fade_Dance 1y agoIt's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral paragon.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI wouldn't mind if it comes with fish and wine. On the other hand, I believe Discord will be the next bomb for too many communities/groups out there. Or maybe after they get acquired first, either by a PE or a PE-esque corp (e.g. Salesforce, Oracle).
- daedrdev 1y ago
- bapak 1y agoAre there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot comprehend.
- hamonrye 1y agoI'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.
- LightBug1 1y agoJust another middle-aged SaaS company, with no new ideas, now moving to the bend-your-customers-over-the-table phase, in order to keep ARR increasing. Sympathetic to the customers, but not surprised.
- Lapra 1y agoEven $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _flux 1y agoJust IRC with - a decent mobile client that uses the same account - and decent notification system - a backlog that survives disconnects - a search - file and media uploads that actually work behind NAT, and also persist - markdown But yes, certainly Slack isn't the only option here.
- f311a 1y agoWith file hosting. Which can occupy a lot of storage, but yeah, pricing is still insane.
- bromuk 1y agosaas are really owning themselves by pulling crap like this. I work in education sector, over the last year or so multiple saas providers have pulled this, we've inevitably gone in house, self hosted, open source. Saved tonnes of money and have bought skills back in house.
- j1000 1y agoMaybe Mattermost is solution?
- rkomorn 1y agoIf only they'd written they're moving to Mattermost in TFA. Edit: oh wait there it is: "Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost."
- RianAtheer 1y ago[dead]
- dayvster 1y agoIt's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is high enough
- freetonik 1y ago>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough. Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.
- raesene9 1y agoSlack seem to be doing this to a wide range of groups. The Kubernetes project and CNCF were told by Slack that they would lose access to the paid version with quite short notice. In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
- cmckn 1y agoFunny, this post got me wondering how much the k8s slack cost! Do you have any references where I can read more? I didn’t hear about that
- raesene9 1y agoBest place for info is probably the announcements channel on Kubernetes slack. that’s a link which is a good place to start https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p1750087118076429 https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p17500871180...
- boramalper 1y agoHere is the public announcement: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kubernetes-slack/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kubernetes-... > UPDATE: We’ve received notice from Salesforce that our Slack workspace WILL NOT BE DOWNGRADED on June 20th. Stand by for more details, but for now, there is no urgency to back up private channels or direct messages.
- Firefishy 1y agoOpenStreetMap Slack https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ was forced to downgraded to the free edition earlier this year for similar reasons.
- Aachen 1y agoJoin us on Signal or one of the many other options: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels#Realtime_chats https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels#Realtim... I've never understood why a part of our community goes with this walled garden to host their chat. We're literally an open data project Edit: fwiw, I know that moving communities is extremely hard, not to say impossible to achieve completely intact, but those who care could choose to join two chat systems. Eventually, the one people gravitate towards will win. E.g. I'm still in the Telegram chats and use those on occasion (also because, as a moderator, I get regular pings), but primarily share content on Signal or Matrix
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y ago>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community. >However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history. >One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more. This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
- sd9 1y agoWhat details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoReading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication with Slack since then. The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key element to this story, but that is glossed over.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoYou seem to think you know details the people involved do not and have an axe to grind against them.
- fdsfdsfdsaasd 1y agoNo - it's very clear that the people involved know details that we do not, and are withholding them for the sake of a better story. I have an axe to grind against people who use technical platforms to air mismanaged and misrepresented grievances.
- mkesper 1y agoThis is a good reminder why it's important to own your communication stack yourself. Could happen also to all the projects relying on Discord etc.
- abhay_0808 1y ago[dead]
- like_any_other 1y agoPlease frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues" with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".
- SeanDav 1y agoOur company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.
- bombcar 1y agoTeams ain't great but I've not really seen any huge argument as to how Slack is measurably better (anymore) and Microsoft wants to squeeze you, but not put you through the Juicero™.
- jeremyjh 1y agoA lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams. I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why. Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.
- btbuildem 1y agoTeams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.
- iamkeithmccoy 1y agoThat Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects) and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to be involved. Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group. That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema". And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow". End rant
- nurumaik 1y agoPissing off community with the word "hack" consisting of thousands of students with lots of free time to spare. I hope nothing will go wrong for salesforce after this move
- VoidWhisperer 1y agoHack in this context is the software development one, i.e. 'hacking on a project' meaning working on a project. You are thinking of the cybersecurity one.
- idjdndnrn 1y ago[dead]
- alper 1y agoWe figured out a decade ago or so that Slack was entirely unsustainable for any kind of community type usage. Glad to see that more people are coming to that realization.
- lelanthran 1y agoI suspect that the same applies to discord.
- serbuvlad 1y agoI don't understand how "multi-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for the desktop" is such a small market with so few competitors while "single-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for mobile" is such a saturated market. For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles. For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs). MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals. And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account. I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes. So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.
- inciampati 1y agomatrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and truly federated.
- asnyder 1y agoThere's also open-source solutions such as rocket.chat, Mattermost, and likely a few more I haven't played with. I wish Mattermost wasn't always trying to nudge you out of community version, but otherwise pretty solid, better than Slack IMO. Is unfortunate they require weird gitlab spoof bypass to use SSO in community version. Shameful it's not out of the box. Many years ago Pidgin with multi-channel IRC was all I needed, but seems Slack killed that whole party, which brings us to the current situation :(.
- hackboyfly 1y agoThis is a nightmare of a PR for Salesforce / slack. I guess someone did not do their due diligence before reaching out and informing you about the price hike.
- p_l 1y agoOr didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion target".
- aenis 1y agoI wonder if they can blame this one on AI :-) I can see that they could have identified extortion targets with some "agent" and someone felt very proud of having automated this important, but often neglected part of their business model.
- skeezyjefferson 1y ago[dead]
- tedggh 1y agoWhere’s Hack Club located? This seems to have some elements of extortion. It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Some of these billing apes aren’t the smartest people. I went through a similar drama with AWS a few years ago and after months of sleepless nights I decided to open a case with the office of the attorney general in my state. They were pretty quick to follow up m and contacted AWS directly. My case was resolved a few days after that.
- gruez 1y ago>It doesn’t matter if you have a contract, they could still be breaking the law. Under what principle? They were near the end of their contract, so there's no legs to stand on. It's not like there's rent controls for SaaS contracts.
- michabyte 1y agoHi, Hack Club member + previous summer intern here. Hack Club is incorporated in California and headquartered in Vermont. I am very much not a lawyer and am not speaking for Hack Club in any official capacity, but since California has some ironclad consumer protection laws, I wouldn't be surprised if your idea holds merit. In the meantime, a self-hosted fork of Mattermost is our only realistic option for maintaining comms after Monday that suits all our needs.
- bob1029 1y agoYou could pay for 200-300 MS Teams seats for a decade with that kind of money pile, or a F100-sized Oracle database instance. I went through the whole slack->mattermost pipeline a very long time ago to avoid (at the time) Skype for business and the initial rollout of Teams. It turns out we wasted a lot of time trying to be clever and not pay the devil for his services. Unfortunately, there are some proprietors in the space who occasionally make the devil look like a saint. I'd rather do business with him than return a call to a "at least it's not you-know-who" company that fucked me this hard. The devil is brutal but not this brutal. Larry Ellison would at least have his sales people buy me a fancy steak dinner first.
- fifteen1506 1y agoOk, I really think this is going to cost me karma, but the snyde remark has to be made. They don't do "Sales", they do "Salesforce"d.
- immdischt 1y agoWhat a dick move to do that.
- flemhans 1y agoMattermost is crippling their open-source edition and it gets worse every year. At the same time, it's difficult not to update, since the mobile app will require a new server version, and most regular users install and auto-update the mobile apps. It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.
- anovikov 1y agoQuestion must be asked: why would anyone teach teenagers coding these days? People naturally love coding, especially teens. It's addictive. And it no longer leads to any career prospects, or chances to contribute to society, or money, or anything really. It's over as a mass occupation. Addicting teens to it does them a bad service. In the future, personality traits that will lead to happiness and success will be opposite to those nurtured by coding, or are typical among professional coders: empathy, likability, social skills... Kids who got hooked on coding now, are heading for a life of misery.
- karel-3d 1y agothey could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.
- rob 1y agoAny verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?
- nycdatasci 1y agoMaybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and landed at: https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/ https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/ …Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
- _1tem 1y agoIf there's one good thing to say about Microsoft (not about Teams), it's that they strive to keep good business relationships with their clients, including backwards compatibility. I don't think I've ever heard of a story like this about Microsoft.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoThat is true, but perhaps part of the lesson is you can’t count on that staying the same as executives change and companies get new goals, such as stock price.
- jeeybee 1y agoI’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others. But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work. I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
- wanderingmind 1y agoDumb question maybe. Can the users in Europe raise a GDPR request to extract all their data from Slack? I realise it's not easy to port the data to other platforms yet, but atleast you have a copy of the data
- gloosx 1y agoI see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.
- lillecarl 1y agoNot intended to pick on Hack Club, but I don't see why anyone with tech competency in-house would choose Slack, and if you don't you probably have MS Teams. I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such. Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.
- dev_l1x_be 1y agoHave you tried IRC?
- michabyte 1y agoSpeaking as a member of Hack Club and a former summer intern of the same, we started on IRC if memory serves. The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium. Sure, a skilled power user can learn to work around its quirks in a few hours. However, a beginner to programming/complex computer skills with nothing aiding them but a passion for learning more would find it confusing enough that giving up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition, we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features (think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps answer your question :)
- dev_l1x_be 1y ago> The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium I am not sure if I understand you. IRC = protocol, Tool = https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/. Anyways, I hope you find a solution.
- jijji 1y agonot only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps
- micromacrofoot 1y agoswitch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go proprietary again!
- thebiglebrewski 1y agoThis is so messed up! Hack Club has done and is doing amazing things for teens and young adults who love to build things. Shame on you Salesforce.
- edude03 1y agoIntegrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and provide an off ramp in the meantime 0: https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/
- jcmontx 1y agoAnyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option
- PunchyHamster 1y agosad that open protocols lost chat wars. Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch of people clueless about average user's woes. "let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server some things just outright not work!"
- xd1936 1y agoThank goodness we have a hundred improved protocol alternatives now. Matrix, Tox, Jami, Briar.
- jrochkind1 1y agoI'm curious about the choice of mattermost, which also looks like it's $10/user/month, not cheap! I guess they do have non-profit pricing for self-hosted. Curious if self-hosted mattermost is what Hack Club is looking at?
- gabo_m 1y agoJust self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element https://element.io/ https://element.io/, I don't know why more people don't do this.
- steveBK123 1y agoA reminder that the only thing worse than paying for software is renting cloud SaaS & ceding them all your data. Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back at some point before the entire world are vassals to the same 5-10 megacap US tech companies.
- OutOfHere 1y agoWe need a blacklist of vendors that subject clients to extortion. As per user reports, two such vendors are Cloudflare and now Slack. These are to be avoided at all costs.
- ok123456 1y agoThe bad actors are pretty well known: - Oracle - Microsoft - SalesForce - Broadcom
- nickdothutton 1y agoImportant to know how to get out of a service faster than you got into it.
- jward530 1y ago[dead]
- ajkjk 1y agoThat sounds awful (sorry to be unpleasant, but.. yeah.)
- bluecheese452 1y agoSeems like a good lesson. Don’t trust giant corporations. Use open source solutions. Build your own. It is one thing to be told it, it is another to experience it. Short term pain, long term gain.
- smashah 1y agoThat's so annoying, but all things considered, a universal blessing in disguise now that the team is moving to an open source solution. Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.
- realaaa 1y agowell thanks Slack ! now I know about Zulip ! which looks quite nice cheers to all
- nyeah 1y agoThey're serving notice. Data in vendor custody belongs to the vendor, not to the customer. Customers can go to court to prove otherwise.
- IceDane 1y agoSlack is easily the worst platform I can think of using for something like this. Why would you not be using discord instead? You know, the free platform that every teenager is already using? You could archive your messages using any number of bots. Slack is fundamentally wrong for this kind of thing. Every time I find out the support channels for anything is a slack server, I groan. The whole workspace setup is awful.
- deepanwadhwa 1y agohttps://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack
- Bluescreenbuddy 1y agoSales force is going the Broadcom route. They only give a shit about megacorps that are basically trapped and anyone else can go fuck themselves.
- dommer 1y agoFor changes of this size, to any client, grace and care is the well trodden path. The only case where this isn't the route is when you don't want that customer, or where you can no longer afford that customer. Does it seem like the cost of AI on everything is coming home to roost?
- nailer 1y ago"Hi Stewart Butterfield here, I cofounded Slack and I'm sorry about this. We're taking steps to fix this from happening again and Skyfall will have free Slack for life" Hypothetical easy win for Slack here.
- btown 1y agoOne of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them. And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator program. But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of customers.
- whstl 1y agoTotally. I remember a few years ago where every open source or tech group community was on Slack. Today it's almost all Discord. I once even went to a doctor and the staff was using Slack because it integrated with some calendar thing they had. This is 100% gone. Fancy startups are still using Slack but in two I worked at, they migrated to Teams or Google after a while, as soon as they were acquired.
- herpdyderp 1y ago> they migrated to Teams or Google Migrated to Google what?
- lo0dot0 1y agoSeeing a discord channel for special software recommended on a corporate presentation was definitely a first for me. Happened yesterday.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> Fancy startups are still using Slack but in two I worked at, they migrated to Teams How do you fuck up so bad that you make people want to migrate to Teams
- dansmith1919 1y agoOur company wants to move away from Google Chat, I'm happy that Slack is letting us know upfront that they won't have to be considered at all.
- jeena 1y agoSlack is still a thing? At this rate it's cheaper to pay a full time DevOps team to run several Matrix servers so you have high availability.
- hrdwdmrbl 1y agoI tried to like Matrix but the UX was just so bad! Switched to Mattermost and I couldn't be happier. Everything that I liked about Slack.
- gchamonlive 1y agoAs long as consumer protection is an afterthought companies will continue to change their agreements after purchase and screw over consumers. I'm left to wonder why do we even use words anymore, when tipping isn't optional, when purchasing doesn't mean you own the thing you buy, and an agreement can be changed without notice. Why is it called tip and not fee. Why is it called purchase and not rent. Why is it called agreement and not... well I don't even know what to call that... a pinky promise? We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation. I just can't trust anything anymore.
- tatsumaki19 1y agoI created an HN account solely to share this. A couple of years ago, our edutech company experienced a fourfold increase in Slack usage, was given weeks in notice too. We promptly transitioned to Google Chat (which we were paying for through Google Suite). Back then, Google Chat was quite inadequate, but I must admit that it now fulfills nearly 99% of the functions we used Slack for. Considering the numerous integrations with Google Suite products, it might even exceed 100% now. However, Google Suite promptly raised its prices when they integrated Gemini. Nevertheless, the Google account manager provided us with significantly more advanced notice and a substantial discount. Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
- kragen 1y agoWow, Slack's customer service is worse than Google's? I've never seen such a harsh burn.
- crazygringo 1y agoGoogle's paid Workspace customer service is fine. All the complaints are around the free tier where customer service doesn't exist.
- drnick1 1y agoMoving from one proprietary app to the next isn't a solution. No matter which commercial service you choose, there will be an attempt to squeeze more profits out of you sooner or later and you will have to pay up or lose your data. The lesson here is that proprietary software is for suckers. Bite the bullet and move to an open protocol with FOSS clients.
- tschellenbach 1y agoConsider building your own (many large communities do). https://getstream.io/chat/ https://getstream.io/chat/ It's super simple to build with Stream and far lower costs than Slack. (i'm the CEO, founder so don't take my word for it). But we have quite a few customers building either communities into their app or large companies running integrated chat workflows. (think airline operations, construction collaboration etc.)
- austin-cheney 1y agoThere is also IRC, which has web frontends like KiwiRC.
- xnx 1y agoSince no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way to dump Slack: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump https://github.com/rusq/slackdump. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?
- hrdwdmrbl 1y agoYes, both Mattermost and Element have tools that can. (BTW, I tried Element and regretted it (massively lacks polish) before switching to Mattermost and I'm loving it!)
- hrdwdmrbl 1y agoSorry, you specifically mentioned "these dumps". I don't know about "those" dumps. Mattermost and Element can import everything from Slack, but it might require following their instructions.
- joshfraser 1y agoI switched from Slack to Discord back in 2017 and I can't imagine ever going back. Their free offering is better than what you get for $$$$ from Slack. Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers far more granular controls. They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.
- game_the0ry 1y agoSomething similar happened to another independent tech educator who was running a slack community for his niche. [1] Slack has completely gone down hill since the salesforce acquisition. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/adrian_cantrill_tech_study_slack_deleted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
- dcchambers 1y agoMaybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month: - https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire - https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.
- hk1337 1y agoThat really sucks, I like Slack but for what you get isn't necessarily worth kicking up a fuss if they're going to increase the costs. I'm curious what they were actually getting for even the $5000/month and how many users there are? Going off the prices on Slack's homepage, for regular users to pay $200,000/year would mean they're working with ~900 users in a work group. I'm wondering if perhaps there's some automation that is kicking in when it shouldn't be?
- sadeshmukh 1y agoWe have 100,000 members, but only a fraction of that regularly active. As Hack is in our name, we have dozens of bots, workflows, and last I checked over 6000 channels administered by hundreds of users. Slack stats show almost 11 million messages in the past year.
- yeutterg 1y agoIt's not like Slack is even that well-designed anyway. By design, it results in conversation fragmentation, with similar conversations happening all over the place. Once you have more than ~5 employees, people have a hard time keeping up. My dream work chat app: 1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations 2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed 3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoYou're overlooking a lot of the utility of DMs for things like "Hey dude, want to grab some lunch at 12:30?"
- doritosfan84 1y agoThis is close to a lot of what's happening at Glue. Threads are first-class, so you can start a thread within a group - let's talk about our GraphQL schema and that thread should live in the API Development group. You can also start a thread without a group - just me and another 2 coworkers need to discuss a specific point that would be noisy for everybody else. Glue AI can be invoked at any time in any context and you can choose whether or not you want to share your conversation with other people after the fact. MCP is also well supported so you get good integration with lots of services like Linear or Notion. The agent isn't quite as proactive as updating documentation without being prompted right now, but it's regularly done by telling Glue AI to update pages in Notion with info from a thread. * https://glue.ai https://glue.ai
- yeutterg 1y agoDidn't realize Glue was still around! Will take another look.
- aduwah 1y agoFound the manager. I would go mental without DMs
- digitaltrees 1y agoMonopoly is the biggest problem of our generation. I hope a side effect of AI coding is that enough people create alternative tech to replace tech monopolies products. But that is a long shot.
- Lu2025 1y agoLast year Hostgator suddenly changed the conditions of my plan without any warning at a renewal time so I "conveniently" went over the storage quota, then shut me down. I had to pay the extortion fee to restore service. Needless to say, I'll be moving before the next renewal.
- seamanrob 1y agoHey, I'm Rob, CPO at Slack. This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along <3.
- ram_rar 1y agoOut of curiosity, what's keeping you in slack ecosystem? Why not leverage Discord and run on your own server? Wouldn't that be a much economical alternative to begin with?
- justinator 1y agoThe chickens have come home to roost.
- keyboardJones 1y agoNo first hand experience, but campfire (https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire) seems like a pretty great solution for this problem. Not affiliated, just sharing in case it’s useful for OP or others.
- infinitebattery 1y agoAs someone who helps run another volunteer tech nonprofit that relies on slack, is there a reason they kicked you off the free nonprofit plan? Asking to have a good backup plan for our community.
- x4D4242 1y agoBased on California’s Automatic Renewal Law and contract principles, what you’ve described raises serious concerns: In California, companies must provide clear written notice of any material change to renewal terms and obtain consent before billing under new terms. Changing pricing from a staff-only basis to billing every user—without a new contract or notice—appears inconsistent with that law. Telling you to ignore invoices, then demanding immediate payment with a threat of total service shutoff, could be construed as coercive and in bad faith. Recommendations: Put everything in writing. Send Salesforce/Slack a formal letter citing Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17600–17606 (Automatic Renewal Law) and demanding they extend service during resolution. Request a 90-day transition period to migrate, framed as reasonable and legally necessary under consumer protection standards. Escalate to Salesforce legal/compliance. If necessary, copy the California Attorney General’s consumer protection unit. Preserve evidence. Save all communications, invoices, and contract copies. This doesn’t mean you should stop negotiating, but you have a strong basis to demand more time and push back on the sudden payment demand.
- JoshuaDavid 1y agoThanks ChatGPT
- Agreed3750 1y agoAccording to the Slack HQ account on Reddit, the situation has been resolved: https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack_extorting_a_nonprofit_that_supports/newvtof/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack... >We made a mistake. >This was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing while we work with them directly to ensure their workspace remains fully accessible. We value the work Hack Club does to inspire and educate young people in coding and technology, and we regret the concern this situation has caused. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
- rollulus 1y ago“Oh shit, we’ve been on HN #1 for a day, how do we control the damage”
- DirkH 1y agoI wonder if anything would have been done if there wasn't a public uproar.
- rybosworld 1y agoThe answer to this is nearly always "No"
- alwa 1y ago“to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.” So… still $200K for a scrappy nonprofit, just a month’s lead time instead of a week. Got it.
- coder543 1y ago> the situation has been resolved Slack cannot unilaterally “resolve” this situation, and their proposed solution doesn’t seem to address the concerns that were raised in the first place.
- 1y ago
- Charmunk 1y agoSlack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways. (- a hack club member)
- dijit 1y agoOnly because it gained so much attention.
- Charmunk 1y agoNo way to know for sure, but you are very likely correct
- Draiken 1y agoRegardless, if they didn't understand the risks before, surely they do now. The cat's out of the bag. Even if it was a mistake (it never is) this shows how they control YOUR data. I really hope they don't stay.
- cainxinth 1y agoI assume there is a meeting going on right now at Slack where someone is asking: "So before we embarrass ourselves again, are there any other price hikes planned for educational and charitable organizations I should know about?"
- bearjaws 1y agoGives real Salesforce energy.
- neom 1y agoSlack responded on twitter: https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173 https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173
- citizenpaul 1y agoDoes this really surprise anyone. In the current en$hitification environment? The second saleforce bought slack it was dead to me. I've only got 1 workspace left on it.
- t1234s 1y agoSaaS is a trap. They silo up your business data then hold it hostage.
- iwasnotme 1y agoIf we donate to Hack Club, can we put a stipulation that it's not used to pay the Salesforce ransom? :) But I see that they're reversing course, which is good at least. Seriously though, I'm not sure how I've never heard of Hack Club before. I love the cause and wish I had such a thing when I was younger. Hopefully they see an uptick in donations with all the fellow techies reading your post! My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.
- tlbase 1y agoI am building basecase.ai to finally replace slack in 2025. Would love people to try and share their feedback.
- jkhall81 1y agoSwitch to teams. Not that hard.
- solarkraft 1y agoI considered championing transitioning my workplace to Slack as the disdain for Teams keeps growing. Nevermind.
- jheriko 1y ago[dead]
- dgulino 1y agoI use pikapods to cheaply host a couple Open Source apps. They support Mattermost: https://www.pikapods.com/apps https://www.pikapods.com/apps
- daedrdev 1y agoI get that you want to not rely on third parties like slack, but why not discord? Teens overwhelmingly have it and already use it, which should count for something, right?
- p-t 1y ago[i'm a hack club community member] the slack has thousands of channels and tens of thousands of emojis. also, there are a lot of private channels. from my understanding that's not really possible in discord. also, hack club was started before discord was created.
- mattcantstop 1y agoI pay about $90/month for a small company I own. I've been thinking about moving off Slack, but this is a good push over the edge. I am going to migrate over to once.com/campfire.
- diebeforei485 1y agoIt's OK to end a discount program, but not by threatening to delete everything with 7 days notice.
- r00f 1y agoWell, that's a good case study for teens who are learning and are going to join this industry. If you rent instead of owning, you can be rugpulled at any moment. And then your only hope is getting viral on Reddit/HN/other places.
- snihalani 1y agoHow does contract law allow this? Is this tactic a common pattern for VC funded or acquired companies?
- asimpleusecase 1y agoIf others find themselves in a similar situation you could look at https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire
- wannabag 1y agoI can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0] I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer. [0] https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/ https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/
- tetie 1y agoLet's hope Slack learns from this and fixes their billing procedure at least. Intentional or not.
- catchcatchcatch 1y ago[dead]
- pythonatsea 1y agoFrom Zach, founder of Hack Club: You all are amazing. Thank you so much to everyone who helped raise awareness and advocate for Hack Club. That wasn't the goal of my post yesterday (I mostly wanted to pre-empt #hackclub-leeks because I knew GitHub activity would show up :stuck_out_tongue:), but wow - you made a huge difference, especially @mahad's blog post that went viral. Thank you. I have some great news. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. She was incredibly apologetic for putting Hack Clubbers in this position and very generously offered to donate Slack Enterprise+ to Hack Club with a 5 year commitment. We think this is the best option, so we're going to move forward. Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November! We hope this will be a great start to a renewed relationship as Hack Club has benefited tremendously from Slack's 11 year partnership. We're very grateful. This means that all of Hack Club's history and bots will be preserved. Additionally, it will open up the path for a special Hack Club OAuth login flow to reduce friction for new Hack Clubbers and APIs to build better moderation tools. Thank you to the enormous outpouring of support. There have been so many kind messages, emails, and even alumni from years ago reaching out. It's meant the world as we've navigated this difficult situation. @here
- leakycap 1y agoIt's good to hear the situation is no longer being handled in a cold, hard-deadline kind of way. But, what would have happened to a smaller group without the ability to get this viral support and attention? Most of us in a similar situation would have struggled to get attention on the matter. As happy as I am to see this being handled better, it was a stark reminder that self-hosting is sometimes worth the trouble. Hack Club may well recover from this, but they will never get back the time, energy, and focus they put into a problem that should never have happened. Similarly, I doubt anything Slack could do at this point could convince me to trust them not to rug-pull me in future.
- noisy_boy 1y ago> Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November! Please don't enable this kind of company in their branding exercise. They just shit on your nonprofit and backpedalled only due to online outrage and you are rewarding their throwing a few pieces of silver to quiet things down by giving them a platform. All this does is allow them to whitewash their greed and brainwash the next generation.
- Mawr 1y ago> However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history. Oh, 7 days to cough up $50k, cool. Slack enters my list of companies I will never do business with and actively dissuade everyone else from doing so.
- xbar 1y agoA hard lesson in enterprise software is that customers hate surprises on their bill. Don't price in a way that can happen.
- sech8420 1y agoI stopped being a fan of slack long ago. Such better and free alternatives.
- codeape 1y agoI have never been able to understand the Slack fetish most tech people have. IMO MS Teams is feature-wise better in most cases. Especially functionality for formatting posts is far better in Teams.
- fpauser 1y ago"[..] With that being said though, this ordeal has made us think more deeply about entrusting data with external SaaSes and ensuring that we own our data is definitely going to be a very big priority going forward. I’d encourage you to think the same way! [..]" Full ack!
- austin-cheney 1y agoSlack is based upon IRC. IRC is a free and open chat protocol that anybody can easily self host on the oldest hardware. IRC is command driven and scary. Terrifying. That people would pay thousands of dollars a year for vendor lock-in and that will abuse their privacy for a visually pleasing alternative is a quite a business model. It’s like targeting people with a history of abuse because you know they are exploitable and will eagerly fulfill your desires.
- cyanydeez 1y agoWelcome to the new world order: everything is automated and "mistakes" are only corrected by special pleading. Enjoy the veal, unless you were served chicken. In that casw, contact social media and hope someone cares.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- candseven 1y ago[dead]
- wackget 1y agoCan someone please tell me why on earth people pay $10/month per user for what is basically just a chat service? There are countless free alternatives available. When did paying for group chat become a thing?
- Sandra112 1y ago[dead]
- bilater 1y agoThe problem with these companies is that they suffer from the equivalent of golden handcuffs. They already have customers paying through the nose for overpriced products. It is very hard, psychologically, to admit you cannot charge the same amount anymore. And if you make a change you have to reduce the price for existing customers as well. Most companies with these models will die simply because they won't have the courage and long term thinking to do this.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- einpoklum 1y ago> Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year Just don't use it then. It's bloated non-free software. There are all sorts of free alternatives.
- jazzcomputer 1y agoShout out to those who give their time to open-source free to use projects. You make the internet a more tolerable place.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too. Is this still the case? I sure hope so.
- SquidJack 1y agonever seen 3265 points for HN post the product seems so bad
- AtomicOrbital 1y agoSounds like a replacement for slack is needed
- jama211 1y agoThis is entirely slack’s fault and this is awful and I do NOT give this advice with any intent to blame the victim, but in future information critical to your company or even just useful such as guides or documentation or anything are things you should store outside of slack or other saas. Even if they don’t rug pull you, they could go bankrupt as a company and shut down or something. You should always have a backup.