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Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accur
by casq 1y ago
Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29
Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)
For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com
- 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.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company. This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and they can migrate if it's truly necessary.
- eru 1y agoThe special rate was charity.
- raphman 1y agoIf a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no? To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and schools are not offered because large companies want to be nice, but because they want to catch future customers.
- lelanthran 1y ago> If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no? Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate." No reasonable person can have the expectation that a discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue forever! At this discount, it really is charity.
- swiftcoder 1y ago> it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate." It's more a tacit admission by Slack that their pricing model can't possible work for orgs that don't match a strict employer-employee model. Nobody would agree to pay per-seat for every customer who uses a support tool, for example (which is much closer to the model this nonprofit is operating)
- zeroq 1y agoIn EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences. On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away. I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing. Still a dick move.
- p_l 1y agoWell, you can amend a contract, but you need to send the new conditions, and it gives the other party option of not accepting the new contract, which means either amending party needs to accept continuation under old contract, or dissolution of the contractual relationship with no fees/damages/etc for the party that didn't accept new contract. The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't even send a new contract.
- chii 1y ago> but they are free to walk away and pay nothing. not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless 'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your data).
- p_l 1y agoThat's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.
- Aeolun 1y agoYou need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
- p_l 1y agoDepends on what you want to fight about. If your rates were raised and you have not received new contract, if you can drop the service at that point, they can't collect including any cancellation fees. If you want to continue using the service, that's a bit trickier.
- conductr 1y agoThe terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future
- p_l 1y ago"We can change the terms at our discretion" is a line that gets the book thrown at you in court, at least in EU, and that's the start of the humiliation conga for whoever tries to claim such a clause. You cannot insist on a clause that lets you change the contract at your discretion and having the resulting amended contract be valid without acceptance by the other party.
- rchaud 1y agoYou just explained why EU software startups do not cause VCs to rain money down on them.
- p_l 1y agoI've seen a lot of bad takes about this topic, but "there's no VCs because you can't ransom your clients for extra money" is... out there, special extra. You can raise prices, you're just not guaranteed that a client will remain your client, and when you change the terms of the contract you void any contractual penalties as well.
- taegee 1y agoIf you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw. We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
- cskartikey 1y agothis is what we're doing :)
- smartbit 1y agoMattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives? - Zulip - Matrix/Synapse and Element - Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits See discussions below in this HN thread. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/mattermost_paywalling_previously_free_features/?sort=old https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm... [1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitations-on-user-count-mattermost-community-version/11580/9 https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
- jeremy46231 1y agoWe're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again
- itfossil 1y agoMicrosoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong" It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
- karaterobot 1y agoYou'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier. The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion. My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege. I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
- linhns 1y agoSad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented. Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.
- elphinstone 1y agoUnprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
- linhns 1y agoFirst time I heard this kind of thing for Slack, Heroku got instances before. I know both are owned by Salesforce, just want to make things clear.
- IgorPartola 1y agoYou mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy? Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
- driverdan 1y agoHeroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
- lelanthran 1y ago[flagged]
- cmsj 1y agoThank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
- lelanthran 1y ago> Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this.... Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end? How many more times must we see it? When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision. If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it. For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.
- mpeg 1y agoI would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
- anonbuddy 1y agois slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?
- hiatus 1y agoEverything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?
- notpushkin 1y agoGDPR (and similar laws, like CCPA) require companies to provide a data export when requested. Probably this could be used here?
- Xss3 1y agoIf every user did a gdpr request perhaps
- hiatus 1y agoI know GDPR provides rights for access and portability, but I'm not sure if you have portability rights for content you didn't create (like messages sent to you).
- notpushkin 1y agoWhy not? It is data about you, technically speaking.
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- prng2021 1y ago“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate” You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?
- ktosobcy 1y agoWhy not switch to zulip/mattermost?
- adamtulinius 1y agoThis is very well explained in the linked post.
- nextaccountic 1y agoCan you quote it? From what I can gather the linked post doesn't mention Zulip
- ktosobcy 1y agoZulip no (which has its own issues from what I read) but they are migrating to mattermost: > 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.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoConsider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
- ebiester 1y agoThat's hard on a fast deadline.
- paulcole 1y ago> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?
- adamtulinius 1y agoThen they lose their 11 years of history
- throwmeaway222 1y agoProbably worth it and possibly a great lesson for others. Back in 2006 everything was self hosted, and chat was - everyone sharing each others AIM accounts around the room. Everything should probably go back to self hosting, including our servers.
- paulcole 1y agoI think the lesson is more to not to pay for ephemeral chat. If Slack will let you chat for free with 90 days history, don't get sucked into the paid version if you can at all avoid it.
- rhetocj23 1y agoYeah this. Do not pay for something that is absolutely integral to your operations, when viable alternatives exist.
- jcul 1y agoThe data and searchability is slacks main selling point. A lot of people don't get that. I've been using slack for years, since they didn't have video chat or any of that. There are countless chat apps, including IRC. Slack's offering is that I can find messages or files on some subject from years ago with little effort in a matter of seconds. The history is the product IMO. The free 90 day version is worthless IMO, and barely better than IRC etc. Slack's name is supposedly derived from "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".
- freejazz 1y ago[flagged]
- mercanlIl 1y ago[dead]
- DyslexicAtheist 1y agomaybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.
- ghm2199 1y agoThis makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them to another piece of software. Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
- tschellenbach 1y agoHappy to help, did you consider https://getstream.io/chat/ https://getstream.io/chat/ ? You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.
- nirvdrum 1y agoI’ve not heard of getstream. Is your service open source and all data easily extracted? This post serves as a cautionary tale about how privately owned walled gardens, no matter how pretty, leave you in a precarious position. I suspect being in control of their data and having an open source escape hatch is what’s driving the adoption of Mattermost.
- tschellenbach 1y agowe power chat for over 1b users. you are very likely using our chat (strava, nextdoor, match, adobe, patreon, and many others) closed source but you can export your data when you want to. mattermost is an open source slack. we are more of an API/SDK to build your own in-app chat/messaging as you want it.
- rozap 1y agoSalesforce is in the business of forcing sales.
- drob518 1y agoI see what you did there. Upvoted for something or other.
- mindcrash 1y agoHave you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?
- n-exploit 1y agoI have a key for https://once.com/campfire https://once.com/campfire by 37Signals.com, which is an alternative to Slack, that I could offer in-kind to Hack Club - if desired. It's open source and you own your own data.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seamanrob 1y ago[dead]
- seamanrob 1y agoHey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.
- flare_blitz 1y ago> This was a mistake. This looks extremely deliberate to me. Are you seriously suggesting that one of your sales reps accidentally demanded $250k from a bunch of teenagers?
- atonse 1y agoNo I’m pretty sure they’re suggesting that the account got somehow flagged as a for profit account, and they consider that a mistake and are fixing it. I think you don’t have to find the least charitable interpretation for what they’re saying. There can be something in the middle.
- flare_blitz 1y agoI can think of at least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one. Taking their word exactly at face value is not “something in the middle”.
- tomnipotent 1y ago> least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one Because you've already made up your mind that they're the bad guy, so it doesn't matter what really happened. One of the prevailing rules at HN used to be engage with the most charitable interpretation of an argument. It's always a better conversation when it's followed - this thread has just devolved into a bunch of pile-on virtue signaling with no actual interest in engaging honestly.
- dxdm 1y ago
- jamie 1y ago(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman): "This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980
- jb1991 1y agoWhen something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.
- andrewstuart2 1y agoMoreover, relying on social media visibility to decide which mistakes get corrected and which don't is a really terrible system, whether intentional or unintentional, and I really don't like supporting companies where that becomes the case. At least in part because I'm not really the type to make the fuss; I'd rather just avoid the risk in the first place.
- dang 1y agoPlease don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something. I'm sure you didn't mean to (at least I hope not) but it's one of the nastiest effects a community like this one can have. People should be welcomed and commended for posting like the GP, not shamed and hammered. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- YC947584398754 1y agoSlack obviously didn't care about the problem until it started causing them PR issues, now that they're doing the standard Social Media corporate damage control we have to hold any criticism of the issue and their response? How many other clients have they done this to that haven't gone gone public or created a PR problem for $27bn Slack?
- bastardoperator 1y agoThey're shaking everyone down, it's been going on for years. They want huge sums of money to maintain chat history. I'm watching orgs left and right move to teams, not because it's better in anyway, but because it's basically free.
- 2b3a51 1y ago"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." The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.
- chasd00 1y agoi posted a comment saying as much but deleted it. I had a client 8-9 years ago where Salesforce showed up with a bill in the millions and said "pay up or your org/instance and all your data is gone". "Shakedown" is exactly how the client described it.
- tlbase 1y ago[dead]
- dhdresser 1y agoHi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing. Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again. Thanks for holding us accountable.
- aroopchandra 1y agoAppreciated that you fixed the billing process issue. Are there any other non profits that are effected or it only this one?
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoHell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days." Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe. Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion. Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?
- milkshakes 1y agoWhat was the oversight? How did you correct it?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- edm0nd 1y agoyall should look into migrating away from Slack after this incident even though they "fixed" the billing issue.
- lukec11 1y agoI saw the post title and immediately thought of you guys - really scary situation! Very happy to hear that Slack reached out with a solution.
- casq 1y agoHi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack. Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward. Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack. I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
- Barbing 1y agoThanks for keeping us posted, Christina! Definitely like to judge folks based on how they fix (systemically!) problems. That said, did any kids in the club voice concerns about staying with an organization which had such a [potentially] severe incident?
- ribautista 1y agoI'm a Hack Clubber! Alot of teenagers did voice concerns as this incident destroyed the trust in Slack and was honestly a wake up call
- gblargg 1y agoI'm surprised you aren't still going to move hosting. Now you have more time to do it carefully and not get burned again.
- cptskippy 1y ago> 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. Last year Salesforce launched Agentforce and gave everyone a free year. Dreamforce is coming up next month, I wonder how many companies are going to find themselves in a similar situation to yours...
- MarsIronPI 1y agoHi, this is meant to be a friendly question so apologies if it comes out wrong. Why does Hack Club coordinate over Slack? Wouldn't a free platform such as Matrix, Jabber or IRC be more in the spirit of an educational environment? Also, as I see it, wouldn't it be cheaper?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- southernplaces7 1y ago>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 While I don't use slack and am barely familiar with its functionality, this stuck out just as an example of how important it is to export and save backups of anything you do with a third-party platform that your business completely depends on. That by itself is dangerous but at least saving all those DMs and channel content would have been a good idea. As far as I understand, there are apps that let you do this. 11 years is a lot to lose.
- ornornor 1y agoGlad it got resolved, if this isn’t an excellent reason to get off slack and a perfect illustration sd to why owning your data matters then I don’t know what is. I hear mattermost is a good alternative and you can self host it. Good luck, I’m sure teaching teens to code as a nonprofit is hard work enough, I can’t imagine worrying about losing 11 years worth of messsges on top of it.
- didntknowyou 1y agothey essentially tried to blackmail you into paying ASAP. while they tried to put it right because they got exposed I hope you continue with making plans for migration in the background.