3 ms·

I 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 embedde

by wpm 1y ago

I 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 ago
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
- baq 1y ago
  Only 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 ago
    Most 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 $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the world, and a sysadmin to manage it.
- micw 1y ago
  I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
leoh 1y ago
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.
onetimeusename 1y ago
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange. It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  "we want something that is standard". Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies. Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
  - ant6n 1y ago
    We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s so cheap - 12$ for storage, chat, Video Call, Office, email. Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025, MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery still doesn’t work reliably.
    - calvinmorrison 1y ago
      yeah its kind of annoying. its not the amazing stack when i worked at $startup, but also we dont really spend any time futzing with it. Microsoft releases a new feature, we get it. cool.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      Google Suite is $14 at the Standard level: 2 TB per user, email, custom domain, video calls, docs / sheets, etc. Approximately 15% more expensive, but, really, it's two dollars more expensive, and I'd say the quality is better.
blackoil 1y ago
Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.
- Fernicia 1y ago
  "This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
  - Retric 1y ago
    People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS company. Unless you’re a very large customer it’s simply not worth their time. Such imbalances regularly give rise to regulations in other parts of the economy see automotive lemon laws etc. Most SaaS companies can disable data exports at any time. Even if you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.
- trhway 1y ago
  Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar. Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
  - phire 1y ago
    A law would be better, otherwise companies will start with low prices and data export functionality when attracting customers, then quietly remove it right when they switch to extracting maximum value. Even a daily export won't save you from the export functionality disappearing with zero notice, because it's really disruptive to try and stop using a service with zero notice. Your company will be left with several weeks if not months of un-exported data. They can be sneaky about the removal, just let it "break" and it might be months before you are sure they aren't going to fix it.
- RajT88 1y ago
BrenBarn 1y ago
It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk. It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
gregmac 1y ago
> refuse to let them export it Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it. You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price. Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!). But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.
- rectang 1y ago
  I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.
  - gregmac 1y ago
    It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not my intent at all. Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan -- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it. It's a harsh lesson when something this happens. Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes (or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but you can't control what they do. You can only control your choices.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
brookst 1y ago
Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business. If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time. I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it. But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position. I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.
- jrockway 1y ago
  I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high. Someone then has to say "no". Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
  - brookst 1y ago
    Yeah, that’s fair. It is reasonable to expect companies to not be complete jerks.
SilverElfin 1y ago
I think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability. The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
- scooter_y 1y ago
  good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people + using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!

by wpm 1y ago

ainiriand 1y ago

Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.

baq 1y ago
Only 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 ago
  Most 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 ago
I 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

It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.

onetimeusename 1y ago

I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange. It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.

calvinmorrison 1y ago
"we want something that is standard". Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies. Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
- ant6n 1y ago
  We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s so cheap - 12$ for storage, chat, Video Call, Office, email. Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025, MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery still doesn’t work reliably.
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    yeah its kind of annoying. its not the amazing stack when i worked at $startup, but also we dont really spend any time futzing with it. Microsoft releases a new feature, we get it. cool.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Google Suite is $14 at the Standard level: 2 TB per user, email, custom domain, video calls, docs / sheets, etc. Approximately 15% more expensive, but, really, it's two dollars more expensive, and I'd say the quality is better.

blackoil 1y ago

Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.

Fernicia 1y ago
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
- Retric 1y ago
  People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS company. Unless you’re a very large customer it’s simply not worth their time. Such imbalances regularly give rise to regulations in other parts of the economy see automotive lemon laws etc. Most SaaS companies can disable data exports at any time. Even if you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.
trhway 1y ago
Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar. Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
- phire 1y ago
  A law would be better, otherwise companies will start with low prices and data export functionality when attracting customers, then quietly remove it right when they switch to extracting maximum value. Even a daily export won't save you from the export functionality disappearing with zero notice, because it's really disruptive to try and stop using a service with zero notice. Your company will be left with several weeks if not months of un-exported data. They can be sneaky about the removal, just let it "break" and it might be months before you are sure they aren't going to fix it.
RajT88 1y ago

BrenBarn 1y ago

It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk. It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.

gregmac 1y ago

> refuse to let them export it Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it. You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price. Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!). But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

rectang 1y ago
I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.
- gregmac 1y ago
  It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not my intent at all. Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan -- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it. It's a harsh lesson when something this happens. Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes (or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but you can't control what they do. You can only control your choices.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

brookst 1y ago

Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business. If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time. I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it. But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position. I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.

jrockway 1y ago
I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high. Someone then has to say "no". Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)
swiftcoder 1y ago
I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"
- brookst 1y ago
  Yeah, that’s fair. It is reasonable to expect companies to not be complete jerks.

SilverElfin 1y ago

I think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability. The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.

scooter_y 1y ago
good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people + using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!