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
Hi 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.
I don’t think many readers here will be taken in by this performative apology and believe it is anything other than it is:
“We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.
“We’ve committed in writing to indefinite maintenance of the non-profit discount terms at their current percentage to all non-profits, transferable only in the case of merging with another non-profit; to charging non-profits at a percentage of a base rate equal to our lowest base rate charged to any class of customers; and to providing two years of advance notice for base rate increases affecting our non-profit discounted customers.”
This sort of declaration would have demonstrated Slack’s serious commitment to prevention. Each clause carries weight, it costs Slack nothing to provide it, and it prohibits Slack from entire categories of present and future abuses of this nature for all non-profit customers. The CEO’s commitment below does not rise to this bar, leaving the door open for further abuses, and maintaining price increases already extorted from other non-profit customers. Perhaps a future press release will close that gap.
An apology contains three components: acknowledgment of impact, declaration of whether the impact was intentional or accidental, and whether preventative steps will be taken; it also contains one contextual attribute: whether this specific impact has broad implications. The CEO’s apology meets these terms in the case of this specific customer only, without committing to review and reparation of the customer category “non-profit customers”. It is certain other non-profits were impacted, but their concerns are not in-scope for the CEO’s statements, which apologize for a single instance without declaring intent to review and correct others. Most readers would be correct in rejecting it as a relevant apology, however valid it may be for the one customer above.
> Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue ...
An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer:
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.
> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.
The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.
The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.
This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.
Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?
Slack is a giant company at this stage. Is it so impossible to see that countless billing disputes both valid, invalid and injust happen multiple times a day without ever reaching senior teams because they have entire departments for that.
Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
For as much as it could be Slack's culture to hold hostage your data, it can also be a slightly reckless sales rep looking to strong arm to meet their aggressive targets to save their own job.
So Slack is large enough to not be able to identify "countless billing disputes", which is not what @casq identified as being the situation (note the direction of communication initiation):
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)[0]
Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?
> Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
And what would be "the fix" had this interaction remained known only to a customer and Slack?
> 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 deactivate the Hack Club Slack
This all reads to me like dysfunction and incompetence rather than true malice.
> Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?
Yes just like the Sev B of Amazon where a customer could email jeff@amazon.com and rain pain onto people at Amazon. someone else in the large discussion said that from their own company's analysis for developer advocacy impact this kind of HN front page coverage is equivalent to an 8 figure marketing spend so I imagine this got escalated pretty damn fast.
You're right though that it is janky that the only way to be heard is to go public, but equally the negative PR has probably cost them much much more than the comparative peanuts they were hoping to make from this one account.
Someone, or a group of someones, has to be responsible for sending a threat to close down a customers account. (assuming the customer is in fact acting in good faith, honourable, and so on)
Wether that’s giving a serious punishment to one oversealous employee, or a light reprimand to everyone in a department, there has to be some action taken to regain credibility. (along with proof that such action was taken)
A junior rep would not or should not have the access or ability to make 50k+ usd demands of some of the biggest clients on file. This does not sound to me like a junior rep.
as a communications company they sure suck at it. sure there are countless billing disputes, but only backtracking because they got caught out? how many other disputes ended with their victims just paying because they didn't have enough exposure?
Hell 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?
To quantify what I mean by "immense", as a former developer advocacy leader at a large public company, I once modeled HN impact and would estimate this story to be equivalent to a low-to-mid 8 figure marketing spend.
I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.
Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.
Yup, I would’ve considered slack in the past but now I know I never will, considering the CEO’s apology provides no guarantees they’ll help any other client with this issue currently or in the future unless they also cause a media fallout, and no details or transparency on how this occurred.
This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.
The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).
I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.
That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.
As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.
It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.
Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.
If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.
This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.
I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.
I find it hard to believe such an underhanded policy was not approved by senior staff members. Clearly, the negative feedback has forced Slack to change course, but that such a policy was allowed in the first place will be held against Slack by any reasonable person for the foreseeable future.
Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota
Wait - this is the same Denise Dresser that led led some uber-high-pressure Salesforce enterprise sales teams in 2010s? Something tells me you aren’t really sorry
yeh that's BS. you pushed your management to improve their numbers regardless of your human clients, they did it and now you're blaming it on them as a mistake due to the bad PR.
(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
No, this was a decision that had negative effects and it makes you look very, very bad.
But on the plus side you provided an excellent lesson to these teens and I'm sure they will consider the importance of trust, leverage, and incentives when dealing with other companies in the future.
Exactly. This theatrical damage control behavior is every time same story. Mistake made by fault in our system or by intern which no longer works here. Not a greed at all.
It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit.
Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
This is the new way of doing business. Rip off as much as you can until there is enough publicity around your bad behavior such that it may affect your bottom line.
And then say sorry to convey some kind of human connection in the hopes you will be forgiven and the bottom line can be raised again.
Funny you mention Oracle: Slack’s former SVP of NA sales just moved on to a CRO job elsewhere a few weeks back. Their early career? Sales @ Oracle! Really, can’t make this stuff up. I went looking to see who Slack’s CRO was given it was their product C-level here commenting instead of someone more relevant in charge of the operational area where this happened. I did not at all fall over in shock to see that the person who shepherded Slack’s sales tactics to a culture where this is even a possibility was previously associated with Oracle sales.
Slack has been a rip off from the absolute beginning really. It's good to see more examples like the OP on why to stop using them, there has never been a single one besides FOMO.
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.
The community here is very forgiving of software bugs, but why did the rep act that way? To paraphrase Warren Buffet, what are the incentives that directed that led to this outcome? Why did the rep in this case act so viciously?
If Hack Club did pony up the $200k the rep would probably be compensated in some way. That would increase the propensity of a rep to strong arm with short deadlines and hold their 11 year chat history hostage even if it’s not the appropriate pricing for a non-profit.
Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future. When it comes to the rep getting paid they’ll become an expert at how to do it properly.
> Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future.
You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!
In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.
There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.
> So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice
I think this is the most important finding from this story. It's not that someone has mistakenly billed a non-profit, but that this form of "customer relations" is apparently part of the standard billing process for business customers.
They are free to do so of course, but I imagine that this may impact customer retention if the practice continues. This short notice is something that I would have reacted very strongly about if I had integrated Slack so deeply in my business as the OP did. With the push for workflows, agents and additional functionality, it is actually a huge risk to the business if you get a short notice to migrate if the new terms can not be met.
Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.
If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.
Yeah, I don't care about some non-profit or whatever. I care that the company thinks it's a-okay to demand from their customers 10x their yearly bill on the spot and to commit to 4x that yearly or else their data will be deleted in a few days. That's not an employee acting out of band, it's obviously their modus operandi.
So if they want to export all of their data they might have to pay you more money to do so? How exactly does that seem fair when they don't agree to the existing price increase?
The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.
No 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.
So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?
I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.
A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.
Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).
> 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.
I don't perceive this as virtue signalling, this is your own slightly uncharitable interpretation. People are responding to what they perceive as bullying in line with what looks like extremely heavy-handee sales tactics that do not seem uncommon.
It also looks like it only got addressed because it hit a someone with enough traction to go viral. That they had to resort to this channel at all raises questions in itself that go beyond the initial mistake and this particular customer.
So while I agree that we do not know yet what actually happened, the response from Salesforce so far does not really address these all concerns, and is not inconsistent with less charitable views on what's going on.
I think this is rightfully getting called out. With big power comes big responsibility.
It's the literal definition of virtue signaling - a bunch of folks with zero context jumping to conclusions of evil and malicious intent to satisfy their own needs to join the pile-on comments and show how fake mad they are.
I see a thread of accusations and statements, not questions and engagement.
> It also looks like it only got addressed
The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people? Most managers don't even get back to their direct reports in 24 hours, nonetheless getting a decision to someone higher up the ladder.
You seem to think people are responding here the way they are merely for social standing. At least, that's what virtue signaling is at its core, having looked at some definitions. I think people are upset at the actions of Slack/Salesforce and are responding accordingly. That would be a more organic or genuine motivation (for lack of a better word), while "virtue signaling" discounts the validity of people's responses and reduces them to a hollow show. That is why I called your interpretation uncharitable.
> The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people?
We are commenting underneath a response by the CPO of Slack. There is a sibling comment by the CEO. I think they are aware.
People are calling them out on the things their resposes do not address, which I mentioned in my previous comment. It wouldn't even need to be answers to all the questions people have. The response could have included things like: this is not how we want to treat any of our customers; we will look into what went wrong and why; we will explain when we know and how we will try to prevent this from happening again.
That would have acknowledged the damage this issue does to the public perception of their business practices. Instead, they simply ignore all of that. Hence, people's reactions in here.
> We agree in spirit but not execution.
I agree that a lot of comments in here are quite emotional. I would be more wary if they were directed at a single individual acting in a personal capacity, instead of the representatives of a well-resourced corporation. The power imbalance matters a lot, and I think it makes a difference if someone rather more powerful is called out by more, rather than fewer, people.
Here's what I found for the definition - it perfectly captures 99% of the comments I'm reading.
"...the practice of conspicuously displaying one's good character, social conscience, or political alignment in order to gain praise, recognition, or social standing, often without taking meaningful action to support the cause one is professing to support".
People asking questions and attempting to engage are not virtual signaling, everyone else on their high horse throwing shade are doing exactly that. These comments are 100% pure worthless virtual signals that I expect to see on reddit, not HN.
> You seem to think people
I don't think, I know. Read the comments. No one here besides the original OP was impacted but everyone wants to pile-on and call them out with absolutely no real context while pulling conspiracy theories out of thin air and making statements about what must be true. I've seen very few actual posts where attempt to engage legitimately rather than some bullshit "gotcha!" comment.
> a response by the CPO of Slack
Yes, two days after the email was sent. Two days. Folks are whining that it wasn't "faster", that somehow these people are not reviewing every email that leaves the company. Worst case the OP wouldn't have paid, their Slack may have been disabled, and then when the CEO/CPO did find out the sales rep would have lost their job rather than what we're seeing here. But I believe that Slack would have done the right thing regardless.
> calling them out on the things their responses do not address
No most people are throwing accusations and making absolute statements of what they perceive to be truth. No one besides the original OP is entitled to a response from Slack, everyone else here is just using it as an opportunity to virtual signal. Why would anyone from Slack engage in this thread filled with hostility and zero lack of desire to understand what happened, because they're so convinced they already have the answer? These posters are tourists using this as an opportunity to show off how mad they are, not customers that deserve a response.
This thread is an embarrassment to the HN community, and we can go back years and find similar situations where company screwed up and will not find the vitriol found here.
Oh yes, people could be more level-headed and write more level-headed comments instead of emotional knee-jerk ones. But you know what? In this thread, you are one of them.
I read what you wrote and I see pre-conceived notions about what is or is not going on at Slack, about the motivations of your fellow commenters and the worth of their contributions, no openness, but dismissal wrapped in an increasingly generous portion of vitriol. Take a look at your words, and tell me you're not even outdoing many of them. It's just your sympathies are aligned differently.
That in turn annoys me. Some part of me really wants to blame you, but I actually don't. What'd be the point? We're just getting caught up in this crap. I get it, it's frustrating! I'm frustrated, you sound frustrated, and if you want to give them that, the people you are complaining about are frustrated, too.
Isn't it interesting how these things perpetuate themselves in online discussions? Somebody manages to piss us off, and the first reflex is to piss right back. Does it make anybody feel better? No. It sucks.
So yeah, this thread is not a great example of the good aspects of humanity. Let's not perpetuate it. Let's do better. Let's do something nice. It's fall here, the leaves are turning red. There's the possibility of cake. Hopefully there's something pleasant waiting for you, too. I wish you a nice Sunday, wherever you are.
The fact of the matter is that Slack knew they were a nonprofit and made the deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking. This is honest engagement, and given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
"Slack" didn't know anything. Slack isn't a human being. Like somehow everyone that joins the company connects a collective consciousness with shared memory.
> deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking
Clearly you were involved in the process and have fist-hand knowledge to be so confident lol. The crazy absurdity of everyone being so convinced of the conspiracy theories they've pulled out of their asses.
> given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
>> 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)
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.
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 will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.
Let's be real, when an entity like Slack says "delete all your data," they actually mean they will add a flag in the database to make it inaccessible to those who aren't purchasing bulk data for data mining and llm training. The data will persist regardless.
Nah, this was one of those evil customer service reps who will do anything to make thier employer look bad. No corporation would ever leverage data custody to extract a quick balloon paymemt. Devilish customer service reps reading from false scripts are the real problem.
Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.
And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.
(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )
A postmortem — software bug fix please.
1. Why did this happen?
2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this?
3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?
@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.
Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:
Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.
For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.
That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.
It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.
The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...
Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
There is about as much ownership here as a squatter in a two-bedroom apartment. They are apologizing because they got caught, not because they genuinely believe they messed up.
No, I’m pretty sure Slack was never a “not for profit” company. Most not-for-profits do not ambush their customers with $250k bills on a week’s notice. I’ve seen debt collectors less predatory than this.
Although transparently self-serving, this seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, this couldn't happen to you at Mattermost because we A) have a free tier, and B) allow you to export your data."
Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
This. The fuckup sounds like it started on the Slack account team's end (or their sales leadership, if it was pushed from above), so that's where consequences should start.
What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
Yep, we're not! (From a hc'er). Zach announced that slack has gifted us half a decade of enterprise+. Whilst slack's behaviour is worrying, it probably wouldn't make sense to cut all ties. Either way- another 5 years to migrate! :-)
It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity.
Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure?
This is such a transparent lie that I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
It isn't two weeks until end of quarter. Like many businesses, Salesforce's fiscal calendar runs Feb 1 to Jan 31. Slack's did, too, before the acquisition. Q3 ends on Oct 31.
The time to complete the paperwork on a $200k/yr deal is longer than 2 weeks. Especially if the customer is expected to fork over 4000% more than what they were paying.
B2B procurement in this range can take anywhere from a few days to a year, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the very specific and demonstrably false claim I was responding to.
Hi, 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.
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?
I 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.
If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.
That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.
We did the migration in stages, basically this:
- Provide access to Teams
- Create all of the new teams / channels there
- Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
- Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
- Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
- Remove access to Slack
- Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
- Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
- Cancel Slack subscription
In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.
We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).
As a product, I like Slack a lot more than teams. Chatting is easier, the apps are better, reminders and scheduled messages, workflows, etc. Threaded conversations are much easier as well, and aren't artificially restricted to certain types of channels.
At a high level though, Salesforce is often seen as a predatory company. Prices are high and they will squeeze their users for every nickel (as demonstrated here). They will also monetize your data in ways that you probably don't want.
Teams chat is pretty bad, I agree. But it does have these benefits:
- Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.
- Microsoft is probably a better steward of your data.
- Teams video / audio calls are much much better than Slack huddles.
- That's pretty much it tbh
I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.
Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.
So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).
IIRC, you have to do something called a "compliance export," which just like any other compliance feature (SSO, HIPAA BAA, audit logs, etc.) usually requires the highest plan. It's designed to add some extra friction so admins can't just add themselves to a DM from the main UI like they could with a channel, but it is possible.
We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.
Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.
There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.
It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.
Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.
One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.
In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...
Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.
Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.
And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.
Used it for about 2 years at a growing startup. What I liked:
* Threads are way better than in Slack. They're top level instead of just a bolted on afterthought. This means all your various conversations scale way better and are way easier to find than in Slack. I can't overstate this enough, it's a killer feature and genuinely improves the overall organisation of your communications
* Font size is just slightly smaller. My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I still think they get the balance of legibility and information density spot on, whereas Slack feels cartoony in comparison.
* Search felt a little better, I can't exactly put my finger on why or how, just that finding things in Slack always feels comparable to the iOS Mail search feature: very basic.
Drawbacks:
* There are less out of the box integrations I think.
You'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.
For what it's worth, Zulip has a Mattermost data import tool, and communities are an important use case when we set product direction.
While I can't promise we won't ever change our exact monetization strategy, we're not venture-funded, and thus are immune to the usual enshittification pressures. https://zulip.com/values/ has some context.
Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
Please 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.
Slack 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?
The question is at what point the community response stops being beneficial and starts being harmful to the community itself.
I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.
But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.
My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.
As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.
It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!
* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.
I think there's a reasonable question about whether this was really an accident or something deliberate that they walked away from after bad PR.
Fixing the immediate problem is only step one. It's reasonable to ask for accountability and that they tell us about what they're changing going forward.
I use hanlon's razor here. Or perhaps a Bus Factor. Someone envoying for this situation got laid off or left, there wasn't proper documentation to track the issue, someone else picked up a warning in their feed and they launched out an email as they'd normally do, without reading into the context of the situation.
Their envoy is out of the loop so when Hack Club tries to respond they are at best rejected as some spurned rouge customer, and at worst completely ignored as they fail to reach anyone who has the power to properly look into it. So they have to go nuclear and make things public just to get the attention of a billion dollar corporation.
The fix, if any of this speculation is accurate, is indeed cultural. One counter to the current culture of tech trying to lay off as much as they can and letting Customer Service rot on the wayside. These PR crises were long determined as an "acceptable risk" of such cuts.
I don't think our engineer quoting Rob upstream has anything directly to do with this (maybe Rob does, but that's too speculative even for this post), but I do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America. This is indeed endemic at multiple companies, not just Slack. I hear this is one of many reasons companies prefer to deal with Chinese companies; these kinds of CS slip ups just doesn't happen in their culture as regularly as the US.
I don't know about "accountability" - that word tends to get weaponized, and I'm not sure who is accountable to internet commenters or why we internet commenters feel they are accountable to us. But of course it's fine to ask what happened, what will be changed, etc. That's orthogonal to the rage thing though.
Well, e.g. I am at a nonprofit using Slack and would rather not get rugpulled in the future. So I'm particularly interested in any evidence that Slack can give that this was an isolated, unintentional circumstance and won't happen again.
From what I can tell the "tar-and-feather thing" is outrage directed at Slack and its CXOs, rather than the poor guy who happens to be reposting a message from the CPO.
Please don't let your moderator's concern for injury to individual people blind you to the fact that the outrage triggered by outrageous conduct is directed at the outrageous company and its officers, rather than at individual folks who aren't in a position with any real power.
I don't see how my comment above could be interpreted as any sort of personal attack or tar-and-feather behavior towards the person I replied to. This is a discussion about a bad business practice at a major company, and that is what these concerns are voiced against, not any one individual person who is acting as a spokesperson.
I interpreted it that way based on lots of past experience with the dynamic I wrote about upthread. I believe you that you didn't intend it to come across as hostile! The problem is that intent doesn't communicate itself, especially in short critical comments. The way I usually put it is "the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
I apologize for using your comment as a place to hang a whole generic thing about mobs and whatnot—I certainly didn't mean it about you personally (or even your post) - it's a shared group phenomenon for sure, and I could have made that clearer.
As an internet commenter, I expect vendors to be accountable to us precisely because we provide them free marketing in exchange for, well, attention of us, and our fellow commenters and readers.
In my days of heading R&D for a regional social networking site, we discovered that first ~100k of our users were both the most valuable ones, due to the extent of their interaction with the site, and due to the fact that their risk tolerance for our /new/ product meant they would also tolerate future products. As such, that "first wave" of community around a product - is - the wave the creates the market for the product.
In case of Slack - they were taking that goodwill for granted. And the community's outrage called that bluff. It highlighted to other readers (like myself, I don't use Slack anymore so never paid attention to the ownership change) that it's now part of Salesforce (and that's a negative signal for me, might be positive for others); that it got pretty dubious business practices (as others in similar situation to OP have spoken up); and that none of the CXOs' committed to meaningful (from my and community's perspective) responses - post mortems; blast radius; accountability; data export.. which means either they don't have the power to make such commitments (wouldn't be the case pre-acquisition), or don't want to make them. Another negative signal.
Wow one of the most insightful takes I've read in a long time, hidden in the depths of a HN thread.
The mechanism you talk about is all too real, and it can be semi-consciously exploited. A bit off-topic, but the way genocides happen is via a similar mechanism. A group is depicted as base, a disease, faults are attributed to it. It becomes a moral imperative to clean the body.
This feeling is thus rationalized, and people start to reinforce each other's conviction. It becomes a twisted status game: the more you lean into the mentality, the higher you rank. Often times the goal isn't even to "address" the original trigger, it's to show your peers your approval and distance yourself from "those people". They the immoral, we the moral.
The job isn't finished if a complaint has to go viral every time slack has an oversight and threatens to delete nonprofit chat data within 7 days. The comment you're calling unprocessed rage and tar-and-feathering just said it's more than a simple mistake. If anything your comments have been harsher to individuals.
Yeah I see how I could have given that impression, now that you say it. We do try to be careful not to single out or pile on specific users, but there's always more to learn about that.
> the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage... It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob.
This is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.
Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
HN moderation is routinely put in front of the most interesting dilemmas! Your response is, of course, sensible. Let's hope that if Slack does something similar to another non-profit, then it will rise again on the top of the front page, so that it doesn't end up being a story of "I got my free pass because I was lucky enough that the press talked about me", when others get a similar treatment, without the deserved PR nightmare that comes with it.
I mean, objectively, unless it was an honest mistake, which we can generously assume because this is HN, this was a really cheap shot, worthy of Broadcom and friends.
> Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something.
how do you know they're "showing up to fix something" and not simply servicing the "10% returns" end of a widespread scheme to shake down customers? This has every bit the look of "shake all the low-paying customers down as much as possible, if one of them manages to raise too much awareness, act like it was an isolated incident".
It matters a lot of this is an isolated incident or if this is par for the course; in the latter case, responding to those customers that were lucky enough to go viral is just part of the scheme proceeding as planned.
I don't know, of course. What I do know is the effect of repeatedly assuming the worst about other people and pounding them with unprocessed rage, which is what internet indignation is all about. The effect is that it poisons community. Since we want a good community, we should avoid doing that here.
I suppose people get automatically annoyed because who the owner of Slack is. It is reasonable to assume bad practices if the company is too large to care, have multiple prior bad incidents etc - that is why people automatically assume guilt with companies like Oracle, Comcast, Salesforce etc etc. If the company in question was a small 50 person outfit or unknown, people might assume it was an honest mistake or at least give benefit of the doubt.
Not saying it is right or wrong - just pointing out that people's patience is in short supply when it comes to mega corps, simply because of their very bad track records...
I agree that we shouldn’t pile on and assume the worst. However, multiple comments have asked what Slack will do to ensure this doesn’t happen again, which is important pressure to put on the corporation so that they can show (and not just tell us) that they truly are committed to fixing this problem.
Yes, and that's the frustrating part of it all. I'm tired of turning the other cheek for companies that are ransacking us financially and exhausting us emotionally. It shouldn't take a public drama for a business to be proressional. Clearly leaving it as "we'll fix it, oppsie" isn't far enough.
I dont know that we should assume the worst but you are assuming the best, that's what irks me more here. my position is that we should be skeptical and demand (politely, civilly, that is all fine) more information about what is the nature of this mistake, why did it happen, and what do we know about the same mistake happening elsewhere? the parent post was just "this is a mistake, we're fixing it, giggles", I would argue that's insufficient.
Every HN user is a person regardless of where they work, and everyone here is posting first as a human being, same as you and I are. That's how we all need to relate to each other. Work affiliations don't obviate that, and there's no substantive point or question that can't be posted this way.
I'm pretty tired of things "sounding" okay. That was in 2024.
2025 has told me that actions speak louder than words. I don't really see much engagement on trying to "relate to each other" on this platform lately. Not from the community nor those who moderate it. Just a facsimile of trying to maintain decorum in an age of chaos
----
Rant aside: a company isn't a person to relate to. They are made of people, but those people clearly make no attempt to relate either. This is a PR response, which despite having "relations" in it is not an attempt to engage with the community nor promote curiosity. So I will treat it as such.
But staff showing up and simply quoting a person higher in the org only shows they’re parroting.
Anything personal would have been appreciated, especially in this context. Maybe “I’m one of the thousands that work here but this means something to me…”?
Actually even a professional stance that showed concern: “One of our shared company values states…”
Sadly Jamie’s response didn’t build any trust of Slack from me…
It's not your place to attempt to moderate perfectly reasonable posts just because the overall "feel" of the conversation seems off to you. The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.
As an aside, there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by on the daily, usually the older the user somehow the more leeway there seems to be, so I'd suggest you focus your moderating attention on that.
The mods' job is to prevent the community system from falling into its failure modes, and/or to jig it out of them when it does (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In that sense, posting like I did there is very much our place. (Not personally, of course, but in the role.) Whether I pulled it off well or not is a separate question.
> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by
I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to see it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.
Moreover, 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.
Here's the thing: the post says it was written in haste so I imagine they wrote it before they spoke to anyone at Slack. There is no way to verify malice.
It would have been better to first reach out to Slack and get a confirmation and document that. This way we would have evidence and Slack could not pull the oops card.
They'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.
"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.
i 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.
We 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.
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?
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.
> 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!
No one is ever going to pay per-seat for tens of thousands of teenage volunteers. If you're an unusual customer (nonprofit, with lots of volunteers and program people in the slack) you might end up with a long term special deal recognizing those circumstances (charging you for employees but not others).
The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it. (Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of future decision makers instead of Discord where these users all naturally congregate was a major win!)
To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit, is messed up.
> 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)
Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
It doesn't matter that an alternate method of counting would be a lot more. They paid a reasonable amount for what they got.
$200k for this service is a joke, not the 'real' price.
> Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
Slack was obviously unsuitable for them because Slack does not offer what they wanted (free for non-employees), but the decision maker blundered on. And now they want sympathy.
> Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
> The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
And in doing so Slack added that business model. And seemed happy about it.
> Slack does not offer what they wanted
They offered it to them.
> And now they want sympathy.
They deserve plenty of sympathy for Slack not giving them any reasonable warning as they torpedoed the deal. And it's not like they were draining Slack's resources or doing anything that made this an emergency.
No, you don't. You have lawyers to assist managers in legal matters. But you can't simply throw a contract at a lawyer and ask "What do you think?" All the terms need to be understood by the manager. It is however reasonable to ask a lawyer "What does this say in normal language?" and "Is there any provision in this thing that sticks out as being really out of line or would trip us up if we had to litigate it?" Understanding a contract is not difficult. I've negotiated contracts with some of the largest companies in the world over my career and it only worked because I was also reading the contracts and interacting with the lawyer as a partner.
In 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.
Well, 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.
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.
"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.
I'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.
You 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.
> 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...
>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.
This 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.
Everything 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?
I 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).
Hi, 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?
they 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.
Glad 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.
Zulip 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.
“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?
Probably 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.
The 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".
I strongly disagree. The company I work at (sub-50 people) has never paid for Slack over our entire history (founded in 2009).
It's chat and it works fine. That's all it needs to be for us. We don't need to switch to IRC or one of the other countless chat apps.
We're never going to need to be indignant that Slack is suddenly asking us for more money and then rush to migrate. When they shut down the free tier, we'll take our ephemeral chat somewhere else.
I 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.
I’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.
we 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.
Slack'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.
I 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
They 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?
Weirdly, there is an exception to fraud if the jury/judge believes that in that situation, no reasonable person would believe what they are saying, it is "mere puffery". This is why some famous, wealthy and powerful people in America today are so hard to catch up on fraud, because they lie so often and so completely that "no one" would really rely on their word. And yet, they are clearly powerful because a lot of people rely on their word.
We want people to tell the truth, obviously, but we also don’t want to litigate obvious hyperbole. It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without bringing in a whole team of UX researchers and bakery historians to calculate how well sliced bread was received and whether Tide Pods (or whatever) are a big enough improvement to meet that bar.
> It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without [...]
Possible for you, yes. But I think it's perfectly fine to have a different set of rules for different people based on incentives.
You could bring in a whole team of UX researchers, or a promo copy writer with slightly more originality than sliced white bread. Then they could make a claim or comparison that's trivial to verify. Instead of meaningless obvious (to most people) hyperbole.
You can't lie to people, and must have some evidence to back up any promotional claim made seems like a reasonable rule for people with a financial incentive to lie or be misleading to the possible detriment of others.
But if you're really so offended by such a rule, perhaps the solution is "these claims have not been evaluated by [trade industry group] and this product is not intended to treat or cure any disease, missing feature, required business need or other software bug!" Then you can lie as much as any snake oil salesman.
By the spirit of the law, yes, it likely is fraud. I doubt you could argue it is by the letter of it, though. Normally fraud involves lying to someone to get them to enter into a business relationship with you, not to keep one. Besides, regardless of how many people were using specific features of it, the service is what it is. This wouldn't be unlike you calling your ISP to cancel your subscription and they asking you if you're sure you want to cancel such a great service. If the service factually sucks ass compared to other providers wouldn't make it fraud. All that matters is that it meets the specifications that were sold to you.
They’re not telling you its great tho. To continue your analogy, you call your ISP to cancel and they say “are you sure? Two other people are using it as we speak!” and you live alone knowing that’s impossible.
It wasn't an analogy, it was a comparison. I wasn't trying to produce an analogous situation. My point is that a company lying to you about their service while you're trying to cancel wouldn't necessarily constitute fraud. If the ISP lying to you in the way I said wouldn't be fraud, then "they are verifiably false statements made for the purpose of monetary gain" does not compellingly argue that Slack's lie is fraud. An example of something that would be fraudulent: "stay with us and we'll give you 1000 AI credits", but then if you don't cancel they only give you 100.
> Normally fraud involves lying to someone to get them to enter into a business relationship with you, not to keep one.
There is no distinction of the sort in the law. e.g. California:
(3) “Fraud” means an intentional misrepresentation, deceit, or concealment of a material fact known to the defendant with the intention on the part of the defendant of thereby depriving a person of property or legal rights or otherwise causing injury.
OK, well, by that definition it's not fraud, then. If I lie to you to convince you to not cancel a service you're already paying for then I'm not depriving you of anything. You're willingly continuing to trade your property for a service. For it to be fraud I would have to trick you into giving me something for nothing.
I don't understand your logic, and your statement isn't true.
Fraud doesn’t require someone to be "tricked into giving something for nothing." Courts have long recognized that it’s also fraud when one party induces another to act (or refrain from acting) by relying on false or concealed information.
That’s why there’s piles of case law on fraudulent inducement (getting someone to stay in a contract by making untrue statements) and fraudulent concealment (hiding negative information so they remain in the relationship). In both situations, the injured party continues performing under the contract to their detriment because of deception.
The key element is reliance on a misrepresentation.
On the contrary it is extremely natural that they do this - when the only thing that matters is revenue and morals are just a roadblock this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do
What's the difference? Ransomware gangs aren't evil, they just want to make easy money and don't care about morals. That is also the definition of a for-profit company.
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).
Thank you for the correction! I meant to type "the pricing where the buyer's remaining profit is exactly zero", and I'm not sure whether I accidentally deleted some text or what. I was pretty tired.
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to "difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll understand their intended meaning.
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.
About… the teenage boy’s… “bs” about his preferences? About his supporters recognizing his free labor, wanting to reward it, asking him to make a choice for himself and him making it?
This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
Moved on to matrix? Many did... and they're all realizing matrix doesn't actually work long term. There's only the synapse server and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks. That means the db just grows and grows until it's too expensive, or too slow (re:IO), to work. That's why the matrix.org homeserver has a 55TB db. That's why many long running IRC servers gave up on running matrix bridges because it simply became too computationally/resource costly to run the simple text based server even if they loved the features.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
Synapse server is the only server that does the things matrix says it can do. All those others don't. Notice only two of those say 'stable' and only one, synapse, implements the full set of features. Also can't switch between them.
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
No, I like IRC, but IM has different uses. IRC is for technical/non-private/random connections to roam around, like going a public place IRL. IM it's for personal stuff, as talking between relatives, close friends, word colleagues and so on.
IRC can be used for private communication, in fact it was the protocol for private communication used by for example warez scene groups years ago.
IRC, because of its simplicity, can be layered, so adding encryption is trivial if we want to hide from the server (FISH). By default IRC servers show hostname of the user, but that depends on the network; for example LinkNet hides it.
Right, well, the project needed something like IRC / Discord / Slack, where random people could just show up, ask questions, hang out, whatever. You know, engage with the community.
"Lots of clients" -- that's actually a problem. "Oh, you want to have a quick chat with experts in our community? First, here's a list of 50 IRC clients, half of which haven't been updated since 2003, all of which have different advantages and disadvantages. Go through and choose one and go through all the configuration. Oh, and you wanted to be able to read something someone wrote while your laptop lid was shut? Like, maybe you're not in the same timezone as many of the contributors? You're going to need to find an always-on server and set up this IRC bouncer. Also, because of spam, we only allow registered users to post, so you're going to need to type these runes in the command-line and make yourself a certificate."
Matrix certainly had its warts when we switched, but it was still an immediate quality-of-life improvement, particularly for newcomers.
I mean, HAM radio is basically a chat room with an entrance exam; there's certainly something nice about having communities full of people with that sort of filter up front. And, for a charity designed to teach kids to code, maybe helping them munge around with IRC clients is a bonus. But for a normal community, IRC isn't the right tool for the job.
This. It is mind boggling to see an organization that teaches tech related stuff be so clueless about the dangers of proprietary software, cloud services and walled gardens.
I am somewhat guessing here: They used to sell this app (for, idk, $300 I think?) until recently. The FAQ might not have been updated in full to reflect the fact that it's now open source.
I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)
Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an organisation like this could legitimately need.
we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to users.
>To change per-app settings for any application, including Discord, on an iPhone or iPad, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Per-App Settings. Tap Add App, select Discord from the list, and then customize settings like Display & Text Size to alter the app's appearance or behavior without affecting other applications.
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is done, but do check our website: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (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.
Hi, 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.
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.
It does matter. People working for a non-profit should not work for free. It's completely acceptable for a non-profit to have an income and assets. Revenue may increase and it would be irresponsible to immediately increase expenses to match when they can conservatively plan for the future.
This is said knowing nothing about the company in question, just from my own experience working for a non-profit. Employees still need to be paid.
This raises some interesting questions. Would you expect to see people in charge of this org, performing the day-to-day jobs, to work without receiving any pay? When you say the people are profiting, do you mean the organization is receiving more money each year than they are spending? That is certainly the goal of all orgs, businesses, churches, soup kitchens, and government NGO's.
It's an interesting question. I suppose they could take on jobs elsewhere in the private sector, and then perform these jobs for Hack Club at zero cost to the company. I would say it comes down to time spent. How big is Hack Club? If it can be managed for 10 minutes worth of work a day, then perhaps that should be donated time. If it requires more than 8+ hours a day. And if the work is specialized then it def needs the right person there, WITH the expertise to run this company --- then they should receive pay for his/her work.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
I worked in parallel with Sun Microsystems (prior acquisition) IBM and Oracle. All 3 were horrible in that regard. They all offered cheap services, and waited until roots were deep enough; then they would change the billing scheme multiplying fees by up to 25
Sun was always fair to me, so much so that I feel like it's unfair to lump them together.
I used Solaris on Sun Fire machines and the support was unmatched, we got massive tome manuals that described in excruciating detail exactly how the system worked in almost all scenarios and a deep programming reference.
They never upselled us on anything, or changed the price.. until Oracle bought them and jacked the support costs up (though, to be perfectly fair, they ought to jack the support costs of old systems up).
Microsoft was _awesome_ to deal with as a small company and/or an educational institution. They had special programs for startups where you could get basically anything for free, and their business side was a pleasure to deal with.
They very much understood the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" mantra.
It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
Slack has been acquired. It's the same with all of these big tech companies. There is a period after acquisition where things appear to stay the same. The reality is that the real work is now happening. Operations are being studied to understand how to fold the acquisition into the parent company.
The shadow IT model isn't the dominant one in the space where Salesforce play. They used that to a degree too when they were small, but they now lean towards enterprise sales. Shadow IT is sold as a risk by them. Want something secure, safe, and compliant? Work with us because we'll sign up to these things contractually (even if delivery is questionable.)
This means that a slack salesperson has to choose between targeting a department and pissing off IT versus working on a company-level deal. This changes behavior significantly. It also changes lots of the economic expectations. Previously, these little deals here and there could add up. On top, you might get credit from driving engagement. Now you carry a much larger quota where engagement is important in practice, but not in how sales is executed.
This drives the behavior you see here. Someone is reevaluating each of the current deals with this new lens. In practice, they can maximize revenue with these bullying tactics. Many times, in the enterprise space, it's better for a customer to be cut off, or give up, even if this is temporary. The intention is for the customer to return and agree to different terms even if the financials are adjusted to something more favorable.
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.
I did it for a few years after I graduated. It paid about a 10% premium over what other dev jobs in the area paid, and you never had to do anything super technically challenging, but you were pretty much at the whims of the sales org without any kind of product management in place. Plus the owner of the stack you worked with was openly antagonistic to the fact that developers had to be involved at all, even though all of their "no-code" tools introduced complexity that required developers to be involved as soon as you did anything more interesting than whatever was in the demo.
So yeah I made some money but I'd die before I was a salesforce dev again.
People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home.
IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.
As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.
Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.
The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
> The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
This is a thought I'm having lot as I get older. I've taken to judging people on how much what they say they work for in the world aligns with the profile of who they choose to work for. Not so much for unskilled in minimum wage work, but massively so for anyone who works in tech.
It pains me to see so many engineers younger than me convinced that they're bringing around positive changes with their career whilst working for companies and people who are demonstrably against everything they claim they're working for.
It speaks to motivation generally, I think. Most people just want to be able to take care of themselves and the people closest to them; they (and this includes me most of the time) don't have the bandwidth to think beyond paying next month's rent.
Can't remember the source of this quote regarding software developers: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.
Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.
Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.
Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.
The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.
But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.
So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."
It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.
This thread captures the hatred for salesforce well: it is aggressively sales first. It's the antithesis of modern engineering culture that looks to provide value to customers and tech first by putting them first.
Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.
Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
I 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).
Not everywhere. Even when it's allowed it can result in shadow bans. Seems a whole lot easier to self-censor everywhere than to track who gives value to the word f**.
Fuck that noise. The places that shadow ban and encourage self-censorship do not deserve your traffic nor your content.
Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
That's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.
You 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.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building monopolistic “trusts” was avoiding “ruinous competition”, the nation would be better off with a few big monopolies
The economics are questionable in a moral sense - monopolies are widely considered to be good for the monopoly's shareholders and bad for everyone else.
The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters".
They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
Since 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
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation
I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.
Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally.
So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?
Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message.
The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.
The purpose of the software is not profit, but usability. Profit for the organization/owner is a tool to achive that, in some instances (it is very valuable, but not essential).
The primary self-serving focus of bigger and quicker profit leads to serious erosion of trust in technology, making the life of those building a livelihood on top of it shaky at best.
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
Last time I checked they cripple the self-hosted version, asking to subscribe for enterprise plan here and there. Source: deployed their chat locally a couple of weekends ago. Overall, I liked their Slack clone, they this one was a red flag to me. Now I’m not sure we want to deploy this, but I know very little alternatives. Zulip, but it cripples its self-hosted version too. It allows just 10 mobile users (notifications). Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.
Matrix is the protocol, so doesn’t do implementations (just like w3c doesn’t do web servers any more). But the distribution from Element indeed is self-host first, and doesn’t break stuff if you’re airgapped. The paywall (such as it is) is that features which empower the enterprise over the user are paid, whereas one which empower the end-user are FOSS.
What's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally being usable under Apache 2 terms
> Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
Interesting. Notably, they also call themselves "open source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit that gives no explanation: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.
This mainly seems to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a relatively recent development). Until recently they also had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search)
So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and almost all features, are currently still open source.
It sounds like the enterprise release is not open source? When someone above says "The whole thing is AGPLv3," I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same "whole thing"?
Is 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.
Funny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky, especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality and the search just works for about everything.
I afraid I nuked my installation already. There were insignificant features, like for their Playbook (or what the name is), where you are offered some extra feature, that goes with the enterprise plan. If I chose my self-hosted instance for some reason, I don’t really need that advertising in my interface all the time. I can understand the reason it’s there, but I don’t like it still.
First time I tested a self-hosted instance was a couple of weeks back. It was their official testing docker container. So perhaps there are versions without that, I don’t know. I assume you should be able to compile this without them, or at least fork the original project. Hence, I’m asking what’s about those banners in real world scenario.
Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives exist.
Why would you not be able to get notifications? I use various FOSS apps (and even Whatsapp) on GrapheneOS without Google Play services and notifications work just fine.
Botom line is that's how they want to earn money and it's not supported in their official apps without a subscription. I believe all the plumbing is in place but you have to build and maintain your own push sever intermediary and clients and push server.
Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.
If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.
Curiously if you ask if they would consider properly supporting notifications from the mobile web version then the answer is always no. Pwa would be perfectly fine but its crippled on Zulip
If you read their announcement for the new paid subscription they do not hide the fact that this is first and foremost designed as a revenue source. One could potentially fork the clients and add such functionality. But they will not do it on their own clients.
I have been following that project for a long time. They are "good people". They want to make sure the project survives. I am bummed about that change and I could probably get the their notification service free if i asked for it (little bit involvement with some things) but I didn't. I respect their decision. Though of course I do have the same concerns as you. I just want to think it won't happen.
Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...).
And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip having monetization for self-hosted business use? (Mobile notifications have always been free for most communities, and we have discount programs for various use cases detailed on our pricing page).
Look, in 2025, and one should be very wary of rugpulls. But Zulip has no venture investors. I've personally funded the project for almost a decade now, so that it can operate in line with our values (https://zulip.com/values/).
I want to use applications that are ethically managed, self-hostable, privacy-supporting, open-source, and excellent. Zulip aims to be that kind of project, and even with all the community contributions that we've fostered, I don't see how we could maintain Zulip responsibly without our professional team.
Should it be a red flag for an open-source application to have monetization that charges businesses for using services operated by its professional team? Or would the red flag be a project that lacks a professional team who one can count on to maintain it responsibly?
Hey, thanks for reaching out and truly appreciate the feedback from the team, not someone random on the internet. When I say ‘red flag’ in this context I never mean comparing Zulip to Slack. For me personally (but I believe for most others too, especially right here) Slack was a no-go since about a decade ago. Slack is just a poster child of a huge massive gargantuan Red Flag. I’d never even consider using it in any possible scenario. Whilst Zulip was my _primary_ consideration to deploy for a small organisation (still more than 10 people). Alongside Mattermost and Matrix, who don’t have these limits. So this thing _feels_ like a red flag in comparison. Here, in sibling comments I do write about Mattermost too, with their nudges to buy Enterprise edition here and there, and everywhere. And about their new limits too. (For which there’s Mostly Matter now.)
This also is a massive red flag for me, and while I understand that they and you Zulip team has to support a professional team, and you have to do that, and you have every right of doing that, and I’m personally very supportive of this-— still, this move leaves the fear of ‘today this, tomorrow something else.’
Speaking of this very case of 10 mobile users limits, I have a few thoughts. First, it’s entirely possible that you communicate this piece not very well, as I had this impression that Mattermost and Matrix don’t do that, hence maybe it’s possible to host the whole thing on my own and have the notifications. Perhaps they just allow users to use their servers for that for free. This moment is unclear for me, and I had to do my research, which mostly failed, since I still do a guesswork here. I am left with this bitter taste that the issue is artificial on Zulip’s side. Again, not saying it’s your fault, I could be someone who did the research poorly. That was my weekend attempt, and I was super limited on time. Next time I may have more time for that research again (I plan to), but it would happen early next year.
Second, it was mentioned somewhere here as well, the active users strategy. You allow for 10 users, meaning if you’re small team or group, go ahead and use Zulip. But I am a part of an organisation who needs their chat, and they are about 100 people across the country (and the country is Ukraine, meaning they have bigger things to worry about than a chat). But among these 100 people most of them are drivers or cars maintenance team, they mostly need no company chat. If they would use it, it’s a couple of messages a day tops. However, there are managers, and they would use the chat very actively, all day long. They are either less than ten or more than ten (up to 15, 20). I not aware of the exact number of people, since in my city they have just three managers, plus two developers, so there are five people plus me who’d use the chat actively. But since there are others, and they need mobile notifications, we cannot consider Zulip (even when we are able to host in on our own entirely) for this, unless we pay. While the company is for-profit, I cannot even think of asking for anything, and understand the company is better to pay and support you. Yet in this very situation, I’m having hard time explaining it to the boss. He won’t pay for these drivers and cars maintenance teams, as they’re dead souls, technically. They are to receive some instructions and ok them, that’s 90% of the communication for them. So while I’d try my luck with pitching company chat (instead of just using WhatsApp or Facebook or Viber or Telegram), that makes sense only for active users, not for mostly idle users that won’t use the chat actively. And in this very situation, it’s mostly texts, so no heavy images or video calls.
Apart from that, your chat looks one of the best among self-hosted options, I plan at trying it with a group of friends, which is less than 10 people. Forgive me if all this is easily verifiable when you actually used the chat. I only deployed it locally to check the interface (was mostly okay), and researched on the perspectives of using it within a relatively big organisation.
They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)
I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction...
Slack 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)
I think it would be silly to not proceed with the migration, although hopefully there's less stress to do it quickly. Slack has shown they can't be trusted.
I 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?"
I have no sympathy for Hack Club if they're caught out by this again and in 6 months Slack decide to revert back to the price increase when all the social media focus has died down.
They didn’t say they wouldn’t migrate docs etc to another solution, if I were them I’d keep it for chat only but with the attitude that if it’s burned at any moment then that’s fine, anything important is backed up or no longer there.
Oh yeesh. If I ranked chat platforms, Mattermost would barely be above Slack. It's pathetic that Discord runs circles around Mattermost, Slack, and Matrix for practical usability, features that make it possible to actually use with teams (not Teams).
Mattermost still can't do follow System Theme, (and Slack requires you impersonating Chrome). Of course neither can Gmail. Salesforce and Google are such tiny companies though, so I sympathize.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).
I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.
Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.
Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms
I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden
Funny. Using Discord through Firefox I can't even copy links out of a conversation. Additionally, for some reason as of two weeks ago every time I click on a channel name it opens in a new tab. I'm not sure what that's running circles around, but I'm guessing not Mattermost.
The mobile app is also buggy as hell. Notifications of direct messages (when someone wants to reach you personally) work only sporadically whereas in group chats they're reliable. Then when you click one of those group ones, it opens the group chat, flashes you the message, then loads the rest of the history, scrolls you down, and marks the whole chat as read. I've eventually found that you can find it again by going out of the chat and to your in-app notifications and tapping it there again. Then iirc to reply, you need to click some "open in chat" option (while you're already literally viewing the chat) and then it seems to scroll and show you the message correctly. Or maybe that latter thing was from search results, idk
I'm also pretty sure it silently deletes old direct message chats. I'm missing some that I really thought existed. Don't fault them for deleting things btw, seeing all the (literal and figurative) shit that thousands of teenagers post in this server I was helping out on, but it shouldn't be silent
I’m more disgusted by the alleged humans at Slack when they inevitably reverse their decision like this and choose to lie about being incompetent over admitting to being malicious.
Slack 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...
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
> 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.
> if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
Is the concept of "full price" well-defined in this kind of situation?
I assumed price was always a matter of negotiation for enterprise-y sales. I'd think a "full price" would just be an attempt at anchoring by the vendor.
That'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.
Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.
It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.
Its true but then again, they could provide tiers that restrict large file upload, video calls etc. I think most of the businesses using Slack are unlikely using their video call system (and more likely to use Zoom, Teams, Google Meet). Most organizations use Slack for its organized messaging system; maybe they should make plans that focus on that.
They try to pack more and more features and realize that when their customers start using these, it costs them money.
Yes. I already address that in my post. Block the features the use bandwidth.
Them keeping the _chat logs_ history hidden has nothing to do with bandwidth costs. They store the data, they already pay for that, and it's not that large to begin with. The reason they do this is to hold you hostage so you have to pay them a ton of cash. It's extortion. You can defend it all you want, but they're all pretexts, not the real reason.
It is essentially, chat logs and shared files. With filters for things like I said it in a thread with person X, on this date, and it had a link etc.
That with a quick and easy UI.
I don't think there's anything stopping someone implementing a powerful search like that over IRC logs, or matrix logs or whatever. Just that slack were the ones who did it, and marketed it well so it took off.
Saying that, if I was launching a project or startup I probably would not choose to use slack.
Our 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.
Teams 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™.
Yeah, Discord not going into competition with Slack or Teams has been an own-goal that I've been baffled by for years. Given that Slack apparently thinks their incredibly subpar offering is worth $200k a year, I can't imagine why Discord wouldn't roll out a "We'll run a standalone instance of Discord with your information siloed and DMs retained for legal purposes, with full Nitro/Boost perks for $ALOTOFMONEY/user" version of their software.
It's quite fortuitous Discord never went down this path you've outlined. "Concord" is now a term synonymous with abject and astounding failure. "Unity" is also taken and fraught with negative associations. "Harmony" might be free.
yep tech is a truly revolutionary industry - it goes in circles. Once you seen the same BS cycle happen a few times it's real hard to not become jaded.
Honestly I have so many issues getting notifications on Slack. Messages go completely missed even when I have the user VIP'd, starred, notifications on, everything. I don't know what else I can do to make sure I get messages, to the point I ask people to reach out on Signal if I don't get back to them on Slack and it's at all urgent.
It's very easy to describe for me. Teams is horrible in writing text, editing text, reading text, notifications. I'd rather use IRC than teams for text communication.
That’s a relatively new and annoying change - if the clipboard has an image and the URL it came from, teams always takes the URL. You have to abuse screenshots now.
That 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".
You can create chat between any group of people that you want and then rename the chat to have a name, but that’s not a channel and it’s not a team and it doesn’t really have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files in a rudimentary way.
I had a problem where it was not possible to include people from different organisations. Once you have more than one external organisation involved, I have to manage how they join and whether "external" or "guest". This makes it difficult or even impossible to set up the channel/chat with the people you want. This is entirely a Teams limitation.
Slack does not have these artificial barriers. You can invite single channel guests, or add them as full-fledged members. It's simple and logical.
People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
One 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.
Yeah, I started somewhere around 6-7 Slack communities. I use exactly zero of them anymore. I still feel guilty for roping multiple communities into the service and helping multiple group of people have somewhere to hang out, only for the rug to get pulled out from under all of us.
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
I 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.
Notably, 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.
* 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
+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.
When 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.
Our Flutter experience over the last few months since launch has been very positive. Most importantly, development velocity is much faster than it was on React Native.
Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.
I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V
Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.
Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).
I liked Zulip a lot until that Flutter rewrite. Maybe it's more accessible now but the new look is not for me. I believe the app navigation is largely unchanged, and still doesn't quite feel right. I love the topic-based model nonetheless.
Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.
Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.
I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.
I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.
I 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.
Moving 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.
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
> 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.
It'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.
Hi! 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.
A 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.
Another 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)
Skyfall 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.
No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).
I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.
Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.
> 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
From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.
"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go very sideways.
It wasn’t slack, but I’ve had multiple vendors that I was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8 business days before the renewal was due.
Both times I’ve paid the new price for 1 year and cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next year when we didn’t renew.
In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment on this post).
I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue crash into a wall and then complaining online about it doesn't help anyone.
I get that regardless there were warning signs, but it honestly seems like slack either miscommunicated or flat out lied to them about the ability to address pricing. While in retrospect they should have started preparing to migrate away, it's human nature to assume good intentions and hope that things will work out well.
There's a couple of interpretations here.
1. The sales rep really thought they would be able to retain good pricing for them and it fell through, and at the last minute hackclub was blindsided by their inability to retain the pricing.
2. The sales rep thought that hackclub was likely to jump ship if they had time to plan based on the new pricing, and lied to them about the possibility of retaining pricing. And thought that by doing so they could force at least one year of higher cost.
3. Hack Club is misrepresenting their communications with Slack to drum up public approval.
My guess is that option 1 is the most likely, and the optimism of the sales rep ended up being a net negative, and human nature being what it is, Hack Club thought things would work out, and everyone is already busy so why borrow trouble.
As for complaining online, sadly it seems that bad press is the only lever that most people have as a forcing factor for companies these days. I honestly only had a Twitter account for a long time, just so I could complain about companies in public to get them to do the right thing, so unfortunately complaining online does actually help.
>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.
Slack cannot unilaterally “resolve” this situation, and their proposed solution doesn’t seem to address the concerns that were raised in the first place.
Yes it does. They don’t have to pay $200k/yr + $50k immediately, and don’t have to spend the time, effort, and money on self-hosting and migrating away.
It solves it for this one client. It doesn’t provide any transparency on exactly how this occurred (like you would for say, a data breach) and provides no guarantees (only words) that this won’t happen again, or any guarantee that this isn’t happening to any other client right at this moment!
Seems 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.
You can patch it out but you then need to do your own builds for each version and keep on top of the patch. You can no longer just 'update' and you won't be able to patch the compiled version.
Yes, 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.
There are plans to fork the repo at some point, since we do depend on lots of custom features eventually regardless (and nearly everything at HC is open source).
As a younger person myself, this talk is incredibly entertaining, kind of eye-opening too; the passion for engineering that speaker radiates is immeasurable.
My 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.
S&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.
Mattermost 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.
This 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.
Are they actually treating their bigger customers this way? Anyone with an account manager is probably fine. Anyone that will potentially be a big customer is getting wined and dined when closing deals.
So who is being affected? The lowest tier customers? From their short term perspective I think they’ve just shed all the “low value” customers almost over night.
And I’m sure orgs with enough spend can negotiate a bit.
I’m not saying I would use slack or that they are good. Just that I think they thought about this.
I will never create a new slack workspace unless forced to. Unless this non-profit is costing them more than what they were paying, I doubt this move made any business sense. And if it cost them more than 5000$ a year to support these users, there's either more to the story or Slack as a company has been heavily overvalued.
So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!
At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.
With 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).
> 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.
And even then (let's say 2008), if you purchased the most expensive license (Enterprise processor license) and paid for all sockets (it was calculated per socket, not per core) you could run as many SQL Server instances with as many users as you wanted on that server, in however many VMs you needed. No subscription, permanent license. You might have to purchase support extensions if you wanted ability to call MS for issues, but that's separate thing and you can ignore it if you don't need it.
I 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.
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.
True, at least in Sweden the Basic subscription with Teams is 66 SEK vs without which is 54 SEK. So that's ~12 SEK, while a Slack Pro user is about 90 SEK.
they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course
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?
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!
Are 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.
Almost 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.
What 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.
Based 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.
Slack 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.
We'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.
If 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..
You 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.
Self 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.
Where’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.
Hi, 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.
>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.
I 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.
I 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.
Maybe 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
It'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.
They'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.
Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.
We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.
The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".
Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable
in fact, if you actually look at the historical timeline, many of the things we think of as core to developer experience only were released after salesforce acquisition.
I think even multiple buildpacks at once only came a couple years after acquisition.
Possibly they were in the pipeline before acquisition, sure.
But I'd agree, heroku is still a better DX than almost any competitors, although it's features and pricing have really stagnated. So better DX as long as you don't need any features it doens't have. But it hasn't really been 'ruined' in any way, it just started appearing frozen in amber some years ago.
The new 'fir' platform is promissing, before that I didn't really know that any actual development was taking place in heroku, but it's a big move, modernizing things and setting the stage for more. Including slightly improved resource-to-pricing options. We'll see if it all works out...
We got rid of all Rails apps (that needed a backend). We've moved our Postgres databases to Neon, and run our docker containers on Google Cloud Run (these are containers that don't need to run 24/7, we're paying just a few cents each month, also cold starts are much faster and more reliable than on Heroku).
>> and what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting env vars to replicate the heroku features?
Yes Digital Ocean did all this, they were very feature-close to Heroku. We have over time migrated everything stable/prod to AWS just because AWS has more products and hence you have everything in one place inside a VPC (e.g. vector db)
For Replit, i'd use it for anything I can in early-stages. It helps to prototype ideas you are testing. You can iterate rapidly. For PROD we'd centralize onto AWS given the ecosystem.
> and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you use something like elasticbean or app runner? or did you roll your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
We started with Lambdas because you can split work across people and keep dependencies to a minimum. Once your team gels and your product stabilizes, it is helpful to Dockerize it and go ECS, that is what we did. Some teams in the past used EKS but IMHO it required too much knowledge for the team to maintain, hence we've stuck with ECS.
All CI/CD via Github --> ECS. This is a very standard pipeline and works well locally for development also. ECS does the scaling quite well, and provides a natural path to EKS when you need the scale bigtime.
For logging, if I could choose I'd go Datadog but often you go with whatever the budget solution is.
We'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?
We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should stop falling for it.
Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.
I 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.
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately.
I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
This would make sense if you were talking about the old Element app, but Element X is generally seen as a night and day improvement. Can you say what the problems are on Element X?
Trying to speak dispassionately as someone who lives their life in Element X iOS, I find it is way more reliable than WhatsApp (where I get way more “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t E2EE.
I am not disputing the lived experience on your side, but something big must be different. Is the server underpowered or misconfigured or something? Or is it using a beta server like Dendrite?
I don't know about the server being underpowered or misconfigured.
I compared it with those Messengers because that's what we as users are used to.
I know that TG is not E2EE and therefore not comparable on a technical level, but that's still what users of Element are used to.
I personally use iMessage the most as my Messanger and in the last >10 years I never had any problems with a message not being able to be decrypted. And iMessage not being as featureful as Element is not an excuse for having more bugs especially in key areas of the service. Again, iMessage being just an emxample.
A reasonably long message, but you didn't actually give any specifics on what bugs you encountered.
You implied an "unable to decrypt", but this should be fixed in Matrix 2.0 and Element X. If you encounter a UTD now, you must capture it and let Arathorn know.
Night and day improvement is relative. For example, last time I tried the iOS version had no localization to some languages, which the old one has, and not everyone can deal with an interface falling back to English.
While I agree with you. Element is tooo heavy! I know there is Element X, but it has a lot issues working with others who has different clients. I would rather not use element if possible. There is a lighter weight Hydrogen seems more pleasing on code and front end.
Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.
I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.
And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.
And so on.
We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).
I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
> I tried running a community on it and it was a colossal failure.
I'm sorry to hear that. When was this? We have been making a huge effort to fix problems like these over the last 1-2 years (albeit focusing on workplace comms rather than discord-style comms, but the hope is that discord-style comms will follow).
> The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts
It sucked for sure on the legacy apps, but I think we fixed it on Element X.
Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.
> there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server
> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.
Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it working, not even with matrix's identity URL.
We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite capable it seemed to me.
This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to find, I think sydent may not have been as officially "canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up? It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have time to resolve after taking a crack at it.
I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x however we recommended our members not to use the element x app since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!
I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for it one day when discord enshittifies.
we stopped offering identity server a long time ago because of the privacy concerns the whole concept raised and the fact the only non-Sydent option at that time was basically abandoned (ma1sd). The situation was basically 2 bad decisions: either lock in with Sydent or don't use an identity server at all.
Considering the low interest in the identity server functionality and the amount of concerns around the concept, we took the latter bad decision - that way we don't offer a self-hosted identity server but don't limit customers in using the matrix.org's one (even with their own Matrix server). That seems like an acceptable trade off. After all, even Sydent's README contains the following:
> Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver?
>
> Short answer: no.
>
> Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity server whatsoever.
I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).
Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.
I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have time to experiment with it.
So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in this article
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.
> Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed.
That's a feature not a bug.
Chats are for quick collaboration on documents. You share it, you get immediate collaborative editing, you do what you have to do and then you eventually archive the document somewhere it makes sense to archive it which in MS Teams would be a Team.
I really like the break down between Team which persists and chat for one off things but I know it really throws off some people.
Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer communication.
Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.
No channels either.
Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how good the clients are though.
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
For 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.
It'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.
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll generate some ARR short term but ultimately people will be looking elsewhere, new companies will start on alternatives and others switch when the opportunity arises. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.
Salesforce 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.
I know a few engineers in different companies within Salesforce. They're under lots of pressure to integrate AI everywhere, and leverage it. The way they've talked about it gives me strong "flailing around desperately" vibes, when the smarter money is on making more minimal but targeted efforts, or at least waiting to see what happens the other side of the bubble.
I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?
Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.
Has any company got this feature? Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds good in theory but is hard to actually pull off. To complete this query you'd have to process almost the entirety of the chat history in every channel. Which sounds extremely expensive, and we know LLMs start to go off the rails when you give them too much context.
Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.
Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.
I 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.
It'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.
I’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.
Seems 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.
Since no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way to dump Slack: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?
Sorry, 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.
This 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.
I 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.
> 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.
It'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)
This 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.
I am a founder of one company and work in sales. Here's where I'm coming from:
As a founder, if everyone is always DMing you, the knowledge is not shared with the team. You become the bottleneck for everything.
In sales, you end up having the #account-[customer] thread and about 4 or 5 DM groups with different internal people on them for each account. Lots of time bringing everyone up to speed when it could be more unified.
Sure, there are sensitive issues like employee conflict, salary discussions, etc. I'm not saying everything needs to be in the public. But I think DMs as they work in Slack cause more issues than they solve.
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.
If 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.
That 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.
Lots 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!
I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...
I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)
I 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).
> 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.
- 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.
For 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
I 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.
I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads. Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy. The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for me.
Are 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.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.
If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.
Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people
would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
I'm not implying they're holding it wrong - i'm explaining that we're finishing a migration from one VoIP stack to another, and the new tech is still beta, hence asking which one they're using. If you're going to try to flame my replies, please at least read them.
I was using element X. I can re-install the stack and see if things have improved. If you want someone to debug with I'll gladly hop on a call to see if I'm doing something wrong. The jist of my setup was postgres, coturn, element web and synapse with traefik in front of it exposed to the web in a docker compose
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.
It'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.
Slack 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]
> In general, Customer is the controller of Customer Data. In general, Slack is the processor of Customer Data and the controller of Other Information.
It 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.
Unpopular 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.
I 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.
We use Zulip (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.
Unless 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
It'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/
> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our Zulip Cloud customers.
> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions. There is no “open core” catch — just freely available world-class software.
The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on self-hosted Zulip.
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
A 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.
That 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?
We 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.
I 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.
Note 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.
Mattermost 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.
I 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.
I 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...
You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.
This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.
I have always found the argument of "They deserve this because they should know better" to be a very bizarre way of thinking.
It implies there is only one correct way to think or to prioritize or to approach a problem. It also (pointlessly) tries to shame someone for something that has already happened and cannot be reversed.
I 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).
I feel like communities have very good reasons to at least consider the option where the most users (since this nonprofit focuses on teens) are already using
The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.
This 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.
Honestly, 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.
It'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/ 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.)
I'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).
Hi, 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
It 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).
Hack 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
There 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.
Right - 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.
i 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.
Right. The sensible thing to do would have been to develop a migration strategy as soon as you hear words like "grandfathered" or "first-year discount".
I 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.
Well, 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.
If 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.
Frankly, 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?
That 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.
As 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.
The 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.
we 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.
As 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.
We 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.
we'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.
If 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.
Slack 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.
Out 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?
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.)
We 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rate limits are bad (2/min for channel history). We've explicitly been told not to scrape API, since admins are working on exporting the data into Mattermost.
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.
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.
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
"Eventually" often means 30 years later. Computer Associates was a pure customer abuse house for 20 years; many Oracle products have been that way for 35 years.
Enterprise software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is as a rule abysmal. My model of how this happens is that there are large barriers to entry, and actually working well is not one of them, because the guy signing the PO doesn't have visibility into whether they work well or not. I don't know what the barriers are, but I suspect they include hiring people who already know CTOs, bribing ignorant shills like the Gartner Group, and having a convincing appear you'll still be in business in 10 years.
This is pretty sad. It sounds like emotion-driven FOMO than reason-driven decision-making. Or maybe CYA-driven decision-making ("migrated infrastructure to AWS", nobody ever was fired for buying AWS!).
I would very much understand it if the reasons given were like "We miss the following capabilities that our competitors have: ...", or "We have trouble interoperating with key partners", etc. These would be actually good reasons to pay more, and risk more.
Yeah that’s what I thought I said - that sometimes it’s legitimate need, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s...complicated.
I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to software - there are people who redo their kitchens every year because they can and people who are doing it for the first time in 30 years - it’s just what it is
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.
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.
No support, poor integration with local file systems, their office is pretty basic. Plus it's Google, I personally trust it less than Microsoft. I still need Teams for calls with external partners, and I need proper Excel.
I was adding a calendar event on Teams (or was it "JS"-Outlook). I wanted to copy from another area in the app, but since it was a modal dialog, I couldn't. There's a button to pop up the "add event" dialog to be its own window. I clicked it, the add event window is now detached. But if course all the stuff I previously entered disappeared, what did I expect, that someone would bother to add code to prevent them from disappearing!?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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"
We 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.
A 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.
I 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.
Slack 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.
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
>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.
"[..] 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! [..]"
Last 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.
For 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?
saas 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.
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
What happens in Mattermost if you open up a thread and send a message in it without replying to a message? Does it still show up outside of the thread? I can see how that might be confusing.
If you make the reply in the thread it will go in the thread. Threads in Mattermost are single-tiered (you can't do sub-threads). So they're somewhat limited, and sure, people will occasionally respond to thread conversations out-of-thread. That's a user issue more than anything else. They're not perfect, but they are very useful.
I've never used Mattermost, so I'm only going off my reading of what you said, but the difference is that, if you're not actually in a thread when you reply to a message on Discord, it doesn't get put into that thread, whereas on Mattermost, IIUC, you're saying that you can reply to a message outside of a thread and be able to click into a thread made of all those replies.
My question (and pcthrowaway's) response is about what happens when you send a message inside a thread without replying to a message. I was wondering if it would be sent into the main channel, with no context, which would be confusing.
It sounds like you're under the impression that threads can only be started by "replying to a message". That's true in the sense that threads are created when you hit the reply icon to a top-level message, and type a response in the section for the thread starting with that message.
Afterwards, all responses sent in the thread are part of that thread. By default, on versions of Mattermost in the last year, these are visually separated from the channel, almost like a sub-channel that you can reply in. In the web app, the thread is off to the side of the main channel.
Responses in the thread do not show up on the channel; the top-level messages which have replies in-thread say the number of messages in that thread, which you can click on to open the thread. Messages sent to the main channel go to the main channel, but in the thread view, you're not necessarily replying to any one specific message, just posting a message in the thread.
I think there are other ways to view this though, so based on user settings it may also be possible to see threaded responses in the main channel (I haven't experimented with the alternate view settings though)
Not sure if that answers your question, but you can always join the mattermost official server and try it out yourself if you're curious: https://community.mattermost.com/
> It sounds like you're under the impression that threads can only be started by "replying to a message". That's true in the sense that threads are created when you hit the reply icon to a top-level message, and type a response in the section for the thread starting with that message.
No, I'm just focusing on reply-chains and their interactions with threads because the former often leads to the latter, and I misunderstood the original comment.
This clarifies things though and is indeed exactly how Discord does it. I just wish there was a better way of handling threads - it seems to me that it's too easy for a conversation to be shoved into a thread and then be forgotten if you're not actively looking for it. That's fine in some cases, like work discussions, but not for say a social community.
I'm baffled by your suggestion that this is how discord does it, because I have used discord for a while and never seen threads (I use the web app and not the mobile app though). Am I missing something like this?
In Discord you can certainly reply to messages, but that basically just references them. Messages all appear top-level in their channels. There is no "side chat" that will contain the threaded conversations.
Again, unless I'm missing something due to using the web app and maybe having threads disabled in my settings.
Mattermost is very different in how it handles this. I haven't used Slack in a while, but IIRC it's much more similar to slack
This has grown into a longer series of misunderstandings than seems necessary. :P
Yes, Discord's behavior with regards to the initial creation of threads is not the same, if I understand you right. To create a thread, one has to explicitly click a New Thread button, OR Discord will prompt you after 2-3 replies in a row to create a thread for that message chain. After that, the thread will show up under the top-level channel, and you can open it up in a sidebar. *
What I meant when I said this is how Discord does it was with regards to how messages are shared - or not, as it is - between the top-level channel and the thread. As I said, I misunderstood earlier comments regarding how this works on other platforms. I really ought to just download Mattermost and check it out :P
* If you're not just talking about specific thread behavior, and indeed have never seen threads at all, you're not alone. They're not very commonly used on Discord, probably because it's not easy to discover them. They're also a relatively new feature.
I believe Discord servers can disable "threads", which maybe what you've seen.
If you right click on a message you can choose "create thread" and it will do this thing (which I personally hate). You can do this on the official Python server for example.
> By default, on versions of Mattermost in the last year, these are visually separated from the channel, almost like a sub-channel that you can reply in. In the web app, the thread is off to the side of the main channel.
Oh dear. It sounds like they made it like slack/discord which I hate.
We 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
So 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
You 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.
It 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.
I'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?
Wow, 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?
IMHO "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.
>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]
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.
I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
>I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug.
Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over.
I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win.
To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.
I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.
I 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.
"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"
I 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.
Monopoly 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.
I 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?
[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.
Question 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.
Man, 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.
I 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.
There'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 :(.
matrix 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.
IRC 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.
What "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.
my 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.
We 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.
>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.
Reading 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.
No - 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.
It’s very clear when you don’t read their comments and then make stuff up. Try not reading between the lines and just read the lines where they say stuff like we were told to ignore the bill as late as Aug 29 and we were sent no new contract or price change notices.
We'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.
> 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...
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.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!
It'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).
I'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.
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
The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You can call it distortion if you want.
I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.
Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.
To someone in Nigeria on 50usd per month, 1usd is a lot. To a guy earning 10k per month in California, 1 usd is nothing. Who’s distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?
You 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.
Slack 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.
Not 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.
Dumb 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
No 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!
Does 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.
Hey, 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.
Speaking 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 :)
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
Doesn'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.
This 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.
I 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.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You're still free to connect a logging bot.
The sibling comment talks about IRCv3 features that show a limited amount of context from immediately before you joined, which is not the same as the infinite history seen in Slack and Discord.
That's reasonable and personally I hate it when all the helpful details I need are buried in Slack history. But also it's a lot more effort. When someone has an immediate question they need help on, real time chat is an appropriate place to get help.
It takes additional effort and overhead to then go capture the pertinent details that exchange and write them in a wiki. With infinite Slack history you get a janky high noise knowledge base for "free". Huge downsides of course, but clearly it's a very popular approach.
Slack 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.
I 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.
Not 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 :)
What 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.
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email.
I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).
They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the last decade uses it or its equivalent.
It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would exist in this form without Slack-like tools.
I agree that people like Slack. $CRM did pay over 27B USD for it!
I just think it's a case of people not knowing what they want.
> They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
Surprisingly, Google for example uses email + real time chat today.
All communication of value, meaning thoughtful "actual" exchange of ideas happens over email. Chat is has auto disappear so it's not used for anything which remains on record, it's for small quick asks. There might be a googler in this thread who could give us more insight.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
I hear you on the integrations.
There is no shortage of tools which plug into email too though.
If the integration doesn't exist, it's typically trivial to set it up since email is just plain text.
> Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
For sure! and it sucks. That is why I promote email heavily for *internal* communications where the community itself enforces rules to keep the mailing list sane. That tends to happen organically in most open source mailing lists.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
There are few tools which are not integrated to email. But I hear you, if you like working in a monolith that makes sense. I like using the best tools for each piece. Best real time chat, best video chat platform, best asynchronous com, best file storage solution etc.
I 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
People 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.
Edit: 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.
Hack 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.
Yes, 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.
Yup we agree and have restored the post. The extra background was helpful, plus the community response is clear from the thread and we try never to fight the community.
The title edit is standard practice though - the word "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."). Making titles somewhat more factual/neutral is normal HN moderation. That's not a criticism of the OP, mind you! - we'd feel the same way too in their position.
By "editorialize" we mean changing a title to introduce spin, or cherry-picking one detail to bias the reader in the direction that the submitter personally wants, rather than reflecting the article as a whole (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136 for a recent comment about that).
In this case, that wasn't at issue. The operative clause is "unless it is misleading or linkbait". A word like "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage. This is nothing personal against the OP! It's actually better for them and for Hack Club if the HN title is relatively neutral while still conveying the critical information.
I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.
The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).
I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
unless there is something going on behind the scenes, like an astroturfing signal, this seems like a pretty weak justification for the heavy handed moderation actions taken. it seems at face value like you might have killed an organic front page post attempted by a teenager trying to raise awareness and save his very cool grassroots distributed hackathon charity from an awful lot of unnecessary pain... because there "must be more to the story". i haven't ever seen anything like this on HN.
OK, message received, I've turned off the downweights and we'll keep it on the front page.
The intention wasn't to "kill" the story, but to try and get more details so it would address the questions that came up for me and that I assumed would come up for other readers (which indeed they have [1]). My words "must be more to the story" weren't intended to suggest Salesforce are likely to be in the right, but just that it would be helpful to know. I.e., does this affect all nonprofits/educational organizations? Is this change just targeted at this org? If so why? But I didn't know it was written by a student/teenager, who may not be on top of those details. And given it's late at night and there's such a short timeline for cutoff, we're happy to let the story stay on the front page now.
Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009 with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B Salesforce acquisition.
It’s not even really just large companies, even though the extortion, predation, and vulture tactics tend to be rolled out once market capture and network effect has been achieved, which tends to correlate with being larger companies.
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
I’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.”
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book _Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book, but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses, and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating their niche with razor focus.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Thanks for sharing. Two companies come to mind: Strix for kettle controllers and Shimano for bike gears. Maybe they don't fit exactly to the Hidden champions category because they’re not very hidden from the public (many manufacturers mention their names on final products, assuming consumers might take that into account). So the criteria for “hidden champions” could be more flexible imo
Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit fails. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
Yeah, I think there's a lot more "good, focused" companies out there than what are covered in this hidden champions book. The book is just interesting to me. It highlights a lot of the economic export strength of Germany isn't due to the large corporations that people know, but a bunch of mid-sized companies people don't.
In some sense, what seems important is a business culture that has a mission or meaning to exist other than make shareholders money. I'd wager their employees will absolutely geek out about what the companies do throughout the organization. A lot of corporations these days, once you get above a couple of layers of management, is all fluff. I can't think of the last time I talked to a mid-level or above "engineering" manager in a tech company about any nuanced or interesting discussion about technology.
I feel like any time a company goes public they lose the ability to pass up on revenue. The C-suite report to the board, who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits.
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "maximize profits".
Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.
The board designs their compensation package that way because they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're acting in shareholders' interests.
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
No, 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.
TLDR "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."
And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.
The 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?
Only 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.
Years 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
Years 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
Trying to figure out if this was the result of the sheer exhilaration of smashing the post button or a humiliation kink where you want people to yell at you
Pissing 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
Hack 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.
I 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.
There 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.
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.
Discord has a terrible permissions model. In Slack, anybody can create bots and channels without Workspace Admin. Slack worked best for the usecase, by far.
Well 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.
The 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
Requiring a legal notice at any point should disqualify a chat software immediately. Good on them to make the move and other users of Slack should be wary.
Perhaps there is more to the story, but my surprise about the business culture of Salesforce isn't too pronounced to be honest. Had do happen at some point in my opinion.
>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 don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.
We’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.
Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.
They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.
Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.
Teams 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.
I 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.
Chat? 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.
I used Teams just before Covid (last job I had used it). For one messages didn't arrive in the same order for everyone, so chat histories often didn't make sense, with replies appearing above the messages they were replying to. The other thing I recall was slow loading time. Slack is _snappy_, moving from channel to channel is very fast, as if nothing ever needs to load (it does, it just cleverly preloads everything except images it seems like). The interface was just far less intuitive as well.
At the end of the day, just about every team that I worked with had a WhatsApp group that they actually used to chat in. Having a bad product as your internal chat is how you get shadow IT like WhatsApp where people are discussing your proprietary information on a third party service.
Mailing 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.
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”. “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?
I'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). 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.
Not 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.
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
Hi 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.
I don’t think many readers here will be taken in by this performative apology and believe it is anything other than it is:
“We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.
Honest question: is there any apology that you would have accepted?
“We’ve committed in writing to indefinite maintenance of the non-profit discount terms at their current percentage to all non-profits, transferable only in the case of merging with another non-profit; to charging non-profits at a percentage of a base rate equal to our lowest base rate charged to any class of customers; and to providing two years of advance notice for base rate increases affecting our non-profit discounted customers.”
This sort of declaration would have demonstrated Slack’s serious commitment to prevention. Each clause carries weight, it costs Slack nothing to provide it, and it prohibits Slack from entire categories of present and future abuses of this nature for all non-profit customers. The CEO’s commitment below does not rise to this bar, leaving the door open for further abuses, and maintaining price increases already extorted from other non-profit customers. Perhaps a future press release will close that gap.
An apology contains three components: acknowledgment of impact, declaration of whether the impact was intentional or accidental, and whether preventative steps will be taken; it also contains one contextual attribute: whether this specific impact has broad implications. The CEO’s apology meets these terms in the case of this specific customer only, without committing to review and reparation of the customer category “non-profit customers”. It is certain other non-profits were impacted, but their concerns are not in-scope for the CEO’s statements, which apologize for a single instance without declaring intent to review and correct others. Most readers would be correct in rejecting it as a relevant apology, however valid it may be for the one customer above.
> Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue ...
An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer:
> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.
The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.
This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.
Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?
Because it sure looks that way.
Slack is a giant company at this stage. Is it so impossible to see that countless billing disputes both valid, invalid and injust happen multiple times a day without ever reaching senior teams because they have entire departments for that.
Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
For as much as it could be Slack's culture to hold hostage your data, it can also be a slightly reckless sales rep looking to strong arm to meet their aggressive targets to save their own job.
> Slack is a giant company at this stage.
So Slack is large enough to not be able to identify "countless billing disputes", which is not what @casq identified as being the situation (note the direction of communication initiation):
Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?> Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
And what would be "the fix" had this interaction remained known only to a customer and Slack?
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
> 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 deactivate the Hack Club Slack
This all reads to me like dysfunction and incompetence rather than true malice.
> Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?
Yes just like the Sev B of Amazon where a customer could email jeff@amazon.com and rain pain onto people at Amazon. someone else in the large discussion said that from their own company's analysis for developer advocacy impact this kind of HN front page coverage is equivalent to an 8 figure marketing spend so I imagine this got escalated pretty damn fast.
You're right though that it is janky that the only way to be heard is to go public, but equally the negative PR has probably cost them much much more than the comparative peanuts they were hoping to make from this one account.
Someone, or a group of someones, has to be responsible for sending a threat to close down a customers account. (assuming the customer is in fact acting in good faith, honourable, and so on)
Wether that’s giving a serious punishment to one oversealous employee, or a light reprimand to everyone in a department, there has to be some action taken to regain credibility. (along with proof that such action was taken)
A junior rep would not or should not have the access or ability to make 50k+ usd demands of some of the biggest clients on file. This does not sound to me like a junior rep.
as a communications company they sure suck at it. sure there are countless billing disputes, but only backtracking because they got caught out? how many other disputes ended with their victims just paying because they didn't have enough exposure?
Hell 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?
FWIW, in case you are not familiar with this forum: a 2700 point story is kind of a big deal, on par with the announcement of GPT-5 (only ~2k points).
The damage to your brand is immense.
It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.
To quantify what I mean by "immense", as a former developer advocacy leader at a large public company, I once modeled HN impact and would estimate this story to be equivalent to a low-to-mid 8 figure marketing spend.
Did your model look at "positive impact from publicity of being mentioned on HN", or did it look at "revenue loss from negative story on HN"?
Now I’d love to know more about that model!
I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.
Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.
Yup, I would’ve considered slack in the past but now I know I never will, considering the CEO’s apology provides no guarantees they’ll help any other client with this issue currently or in the future unless they also cause a media fallout, and no details or transparency on how this occurred.
This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.
The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).
I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.
That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.
As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.
It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.
Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.
If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.
> "Thanks for holding us accountable."
The real fallout from today may be hard to take account of.
I can't be the only one who saw this situation unfold and decided "I'll be certain to self-host if I ever set up something like this"
This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.
I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.
I find it hard to believe such an underhanded policy was not approved by senior staff members. Clearly, the negative feedback has forced Slack to change course, but that such a policy was allowed in the first place will be held against Slack by any reasonable person for the foreseeable future.
Appreciated that you fixed the billing process issue. Are there any other non profits that are effected or it only this one?
> Thanks for holding us accountable.
Donation time - May I humbly suggest $195k. Accountability means there are no one way bets, when you stand to gain you stand to lose.
Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota
What was the oversight? How did you correct it?
They won’t answer, because they’re not interested in actually being accountable.
Wait - this is the same Denise Dresser that led led some uber-high-pressure Salesforce enterprise sales teams in 2010s? Something tells me you aren’t really sorry
Blackmail by mistake sorry!
Thank you Denise! Christina (Hack Club cofounder)
You restored their pricing, and thats it? No gesture of goodwill to cover the cost they have borne being stressed and coming on here to post about it?
lol..... what a joke.
yeh that's BS. you pushed your management to improve their numbers regardless of your human clients, they did it and now you're blaming it on them as a mistake due to the bad PR.
Hey, 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:.
Can you comment on the other organizations who've had similar experiences recently?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287607 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
Move to other platforms? xD
(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
:bow:
The great @dang has spoken.
No, this was a decision that had negative effects and it makes you look very, very bad.
But on the plus side you provided an excellent lesson to these teens and I'm sure they will consider the importance of trust, leverage, and incentives when dealing with other companies in the future.
Exactly. This theatrical damage control behavior is every time same story. Mistake made by fault in our system or by intern which no longer works here. Not a greed at all.
I bet they'll just keep using slack, but we can dream.
we are still using slack
womp womp
It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit.
Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
This is the new way of doing business. Rip off as much as you can until there is enough publicity around your bad behavior such that it may affect your bottom line.
And then say sorry to convey some kind of human connection in the hopes you will be forgiven and the bottom line can be raised again.
Not new. Ever heard of Oracle? :)
Funny you mention Oracle: Slack’s former SVP of NA sales just moved on to a CRO job elsewhere a few weeks back. Their early career? Sales @ Oracle! Really, can’t make this stuff up. I went looking to see who Slack’s CRO was given it was their product C-level here commenting instead of someone more relevant in charge of the operational area where this happened. I did not at all fall over in shock to see that the person who shepherded Slack’s sales tactics to a culture where this is even a possibility was previously associated with Oracle sales.
Except that Oracle doesn't say sorry and doesn't appear to have any human connection at all, they don't even fake it.
Yeah, don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower folks
He used to work there, hence my comment about linkedin lol.
Slack has been a rip off from the absolute beginning really. It's good to see more examples like the OP on why to stop using them, there has never been a single one besides FOMO.
One look at his LinkedIn and all becomes clear lol.
Are you describing PG&E?
You're not going to hear back from @seamanrob. I guarantee it.
>are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
No answer means this.
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
I doubt it
"We used the wrong React hook which increased the billing rate of our customers. Sorry"
Ref: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/cloudflare_ddosed_its...
This is a joke right?
I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.
The community here is very forgiving of software bugs, but why did the rep act that way? To paraphrase Warren Buffet, what are the incentives that directed that led to this outcome? Why did the rep in this case act so viciously?
If Hack Club did pony up the $200k the rep would probably be compensated in some way. That would increase the propensity of a rep to strong arm with short deadlines and hold their 11 year chat history hostage even if it’s not the appropriate pricing for a non-profit.
Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future. When it comes to the rep getting paid they’ll become an expert at how to do it properly.
> Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future.
You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.
Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake.
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!
In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
> an oversight in our billing process
So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.
There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.
> So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice
I think this is the most important finding from this story. It's not that someone has mistakenly billed a non-profit, but that this form of "customer relations" is apparently part of the standard billing process for business customers.
They are free to do so of course, but I imagine that this may impact customer retention if the practice continues. This short notice is something that I would have reacted very strongly about if I had integrated Slack so deeply in my business as the OP did. With the push for workflows, agents and additional functionality, it is actually a huge risk to the business if you get a short notice to migrate if the new terms can not be met.
Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.
If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.
Yeah, I don't care about some non-profit or whatever. I care that the company thinks it's a-okay to demand from their customers 10x their yearly bill on the spot and to commit to 4x that yearly or else their data will be deleted in a few days. That's not an employee acting out of band, it's obviously their modus operandi.
Zach has posted separately about Hack Club continuing on Slack. In general, customers can export their data and the options for that by our various subscription plans are here: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp....
So if they want to export all of their data they might have to pay you more money to do so? How exactly does that seem fair when they don't agree to the existing price increase?
Good to know this!
What I miss from these sort of apologies is an actual postmortem like the one we'd have for a software bug.
What was this oversight? What caused it? What are you exactly doing to prevent it from happening in the future?
> I cannot guarantee
You mean you won't guarantee. You could guarantee this if you invested in customer service. Choosing not to do so is a choice.
The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.
Is that a good advert for Salesforce?
No guarantees needed (and good on ya for this fix)!
Def do encourage the post mortem with root-cause analysis & robust corrective action plan. Thanks for being here.
> 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?
No 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.
There was a phone call, there was a human, this was not resolved until there was a public backlash.
So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?
I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.
A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.
Just a guess.
Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).
I 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”.
> 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.
I don't perceive this as virtue signalling, this is your own slightly uncharitable interpretation. People are responding to what they perceive as bullying in line with what looks like extremely heavy-handee sales tactics that do not seem uncommon.
It also looks like it only got addressed because it hit a someone with enough traction to go viral. That they had to resort to this channel at all raises questions in itself that go beyond the initial mistake and this particular customer.
So while I agree that we do not know yet what actually happened, the response from Salesforce so far does not really address these all concerns, and is not inconsistent with less charitable views on what's going on.
I think this is rightfully getting called out. With big power comes big responsibility.
> don't perceive this as virtue signalling
It's the literal definition of virtue signaling - a bunch of folks with zero context jumping to conclusions of evil and malicious intent to satisfy their own needs to join the pile-on comments and show how fake mad they are.
I see a thread of accusations and statements, not questions and engagement.
> It also looks like it only got addressed
The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people? Most managers don't even get back to their direct reports in 24 hours, nonetheless getting a decision to someone higher up the ladder.
> I think this is rightfully getting called out
We agree in spirit but not execution.
> It's the literal definition of virtue signaling
You seem to think people are responding here the way they are merely for social standing. At least, that's what virtue signaling is at its core, having looked at some definitions. I think people are upset at the actions of Slack/Salesforce and are responding accordingly. That would be a more organic or genuine motivation (for lack of a better word), while "virtue signaling" discounts the validity of people's responses and reduces them to a hollow show. That is why I called your interpretation uncharitable.
> The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people?
We are commenting underneath a response by the CPO of Slack. There is a sibling comment by the CEO. I think they are aware.
People are calling them out on the things their resposes do not address, which I mentioned in my previous comment. It wouldn't even need to be answers to all the questions people have. The response could have included things like: this is not how we want to treat any of our customers; we will look into what went wrong and why; we will explain when we know and how we will try to prevent this from happening again.
That would have acknowledged the damage this issue does to the public perception of their business practices. Instead, they simply ignore all of that. Hence, people's reactions in here.
> We agree in spirit but not execution.
I agree that a lot of comments in here are quite emotional. I would be more wary if they were directed at a single individual acting in a personal capacity, instead of the representatives of a well-resourced corporation. The power imbalance matters a lot, and I think it makes a difference if someone rather more powerful is called out by more, rather than fewer, people.
Here's what I found for the definition - it perfectly captures 99% of the comments I'm reading.
"...the practice of conspicuously displaying one's good character, social conscience, or political alignment in order to gain praise, recognition, or social standing, often without taking meaningful action to support the cause one is professing to support".
People asking questions and attempting to engage are not virtual signaling, everyone else on their high horse throwing shade are doing exactly that. These comments are 100% pure worthless virtual signals that I expect to see on reddit, not HN.
> You seem to think people
I don't think, I know. Read the comments. No one here besides the original OP was impacted but everyone wants to pile-on and call them out with absolutely no real context while pulling conspiracy theories out of thin air and making statements about what must be true. I've seen very few actual posts where attempt to engage legitimately rather than some bullshit "gotcha!" comment.
> a response by the CPO of Slack
Yes, two days after the email was sent. Two days. Folks are whining that it wasn't "faster", that somehow these people are not reviewing every email that leaves the company. Worst case the OP wouldn't have paid, their Slack may have been disabled, and then when the CEO/CPO did find out the sales rep would have lost their job rather than what we're seeing here. But I believe that Slack would have done the right thing regardless.
> calling them out on the things their responses do not address
No most people are throwing accusations and making absolute statements of what they perceive to be truth. No one besides the original OP is entitled to a response from Slack, everyone else here is just using it as an opportunity to virtual signal. Why would anyone from Slack engage in this thread filled with hostility and zero lack of desire to understand what happened, because they're so convinced they already have the answer? These posters are tourists using this as an opportunity to show off how mad they are, not customers that deserve a response.
This thread is an embarrassment to the HN community, and we can go back years and find similar situations where company screwed up and will not find the vitriol found here.
Oh yes, people could be more level-headed and write more level-headed comments instead of emotional knee-jerk ones. But you know what? In this thread, you are one of them.
I read what you wrote and I see pre-conceived notions about what is or is not going on at Slack, about the motivations of your fellow commenters and the worth of their contributions, no openness, but dismissal wrapped in an increasingly generous portion of vitriol. Take a look at your words, and tell me you're not even outdoing many of them. It's just your sympathies are aligned differently.
That in turn annoys me. Some part of me really wants to blame you, but I actually don't. What'd be the point? We're just getting caught up in this crap. I get it, it's frustrating! I'm frustrated, you sound frustrated, and if you want to give them that, the people you are complaining about are frustrated, too.
Isn't it interesting how these things perpetuate themselves in online discussions? Somebody manages to piss us off, and the first reflex is to piss right back. Does it make anybody feel better? No. It sucks.
So yeah, this thread is not a great example of the good aspects of humanity. Let's not perpetuate it. Let's do better. Let's do something nice. It's fall here, the leaves are turning red. There's the possibility of cake. Hopefully there's something pleasant waiting for you, too. I wish you a nice Sunday, wherever you are.
The fact of the matter is that Slack knew they were a nonprofit and made the deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking. This is honest engagement, and given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
> Slack knew they were a nonprofit
"Slack" didn't know anything. Slack isn't a human being. Like somehow everyone that joins the company connects a collective consciousness with shared memory.
> deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking
Clearly you were involved in the process and have fist-hand knowledge to be so confident lol. The crazy absurdity of everyone being so convinced of the conspiracy theories they've pulled out of their asses.
> given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
>> 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)
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
0 - https://accountinginsights.org/what-is-appreciation-in-accou...
His response speaks volumes. Yours too.
>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:.
Undoubtedly the only mistake here was this getting attention. I'm sure hundreds of other groups have had the same experience Hack Club did.
Thank you for responding and taking this on.
> We're fixing it
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.
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 will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.
Let's be real, when an entity like Slack says "delete all your data," they actually mean they will add a flag in the database to make it inaccessible to those who aren't purchasing bulk data for data mining and llm training. The data will persist regardless.
yup, agreed. this is a super shady pressure tactic that should be shamed.
So what exactly was the oversight here? Is it normal practice to change contracts and billing plans and threaten deactivation within 7 days?
Nah, this was one of those evil customer service reps who will do anything to make thier employer look bad. No corporation would ever leverage data custody to extract a quick balloon paymemt. Devilish customer service reps reading from false scripts are the real problem.
Can customer service reps take such big decisions on their own without some kind of oversight from the seniors?
"Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: ‘I need less heads’"
https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-ma...
Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.
And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.
(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )
A postmortem — software bug fix please. 1. Why did this happen? 2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this? 3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?
One would like to know why were https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac... changes not applied to billing this time around?
With great power comes great responsibility.
@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.
Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:
Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.
For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.
That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.
It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.
The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...
Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
How many other 'mistakes' are there though? How many others are being exploited but just foot the bill?
Great you are owning the mistake and fixing it.
May I suggest a public post mortem so that the doubters can see that you went after the root cause?
Might be interesting for HN as well as big companies have mistakes in policy, teams and automated collections...
There is about as much ownership here as a squatter in a two-bedroom apartment. They are apologizing because they got caught, not because they genuinely believe they messed up.
Someone suggested the possibility that the org status change which moved them out of the "not for profit".
After this the billing department might just get a list of companies that are behind and start a process.
No, I’m pretty sure Slack was never a “not for profit” company. Most not-for-profits do not ambush their customers with $250k bills on a week’s notice. I’ve seen debt collectors less predatory than this.
I'm referring to Hack Club. Am I incorrect about the details related to not for profit?
zero owning of the mistake. calling it an 'oversight' with no real apologies is just a brush off
Hi Rob, I'm Ian, CEO at Mattermost. Apologies for repeating the question from jrflowers, but I couldn't resist:
>Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history?
Mattermost is self-hosted and enables full data control.
There's some organizations that want to move to Mattermost for various reasons.
It's important for them to bring along their data.
Wondering what your opinion might be?
cancelled our company's slack plan when all this news dropped. We're looking at Mattermost, the reviews are really good
What a weird attempt at injecting your product marketing.
Although transparently self-serving, this seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, this couldn't happen to you at Mattermost because we A) have a free tier, and B) allow you to export your data."
This is hacker news, hackers are ceos, too, and have a very relevant product or service to sell. If anything he didn’t do it enough in this thread.
I was wondering about what options exist for Slack, and Mattermost along with a few others do seem to have a completely free layer.
Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
You could start by explaining what exactly went wrong. Not doing that would be a mistake.
It backfired badly, and now it was a mistake... Seems like posting it helped giving it some sort of resolution
A few more heart emojis ought to make this go away.
> This was a mistake.
Yeah, right. Tell us more.
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
> This was a mistake.
I would be not at all surprised if Benioff said the initial deal was a mistake and you’ve fixed it now.
Nevertheless glad to see someone here trying to put out the fire, even if in the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.
How many others get this treatment without the publicity, y'all still showed your colors. Enjoy your business practices.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
For whole chain of command up to CEO and board. That is least we should ask each and every time.
*This was a mistake on knowing this would blow up
Will there be a publicly available post-mortem when the root cause has been identified?
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
This. The fuckup sounds like it started on the Slack account team's end (or their sales leadership, if it was pushed from above), so that's where consequences should start.
Agreed, someone had to meet their 3rd quarter goal and threw a Hail Mary at Hack Club. Shameless.
What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
This wasn't a mistake, you got caught.
Since everything is being fixed, does that mean that "Hack Club" is not going to move to mattermost after all?
Yep, we're not! (From a hc'er). Zach announced that slack has gifted us half a decade of enterprise+. Whilst slack's behaviour is worrying, it probably wouldn't make sense to cut all ties. Either way- another 5 years to migrate! :-)
Can you explain the nature of the mistake?
Like someone who didn't know or a change that they were lumped into?
It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity.
Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure?
This is such a transparent lie that I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
It isn't two weeks until end of quarter. Like many businesses, Salesforce's fiscal calendar runs Feb 1 to Jan 31. Slack's did, too, before the acquisition. Q3 ends on Oct 31.
The time to complete the paperwork on a $200k/yr deal is longer than 2 weeks. Especially if the customer is expected to fork over 4000% more than what they were paying.
B2B procurement in this range can take anywhere from a few days to a year, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the very specific and demonstrably false claim I was responding to.
Fair, it’s 6 weeks until the end of the quarter.
There’s still a human account manager involved, it wasn’t an automated billing error.
Exactly — anyone who has worked in sales for a New York minute knows that any six figures deal will have a human account manager assigned to it.
Thanks, Rob, for owning up to it and doing something about it.
I definitely heard about another nonprofit group that got similarly punted last quarter, or maybe the quarter before... shame I can't remember it now.
so you couldn't respond to your client but had enought time to make an account and post here because of the blowback?
Way to go Rob! Thanks for owning up to it. And for being persistent about correcting it.
lol a "mistake"
Feeling incredulous that this "mistake" ever would have been rectified had it not been for the public attention this is getting.
this era of trying to fly under the radar until you get called out on HN is a really great look
/s
:heart:
Hi, 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.
I'm surprised you aren't still going to move hosting. Now you have more time to do it carefully and not get burned again.
Thanks 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?
I'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
I 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.
Do you have his email address? Send it to christina@hackclub.com
I do but it’s also very easily googleable and exactly what you would imagine. Everyone in Salesforce is generally either flast or first.last (or both)
If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.
We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.
That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.
https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.
We did the migration in stages, basically this:
In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).
> In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs
Or, they could not in some practical manner do searches on previous posts, so they didn’t use them?
Wait. You moved from slack to teams? Why? We are in the process of moving to slack from teams and I can’t phantom something worse than teams.
As a product, I like Slack a lot more than teams. Chatting is easier, the apps are better, reminders and scheduled messages, workflows, etc. Threaded conversations are much easier as well, and aren't artificially restricted to certain types of channels.
At a high level though, Salesforce is often seen as a predatory company. Prices are high and they will squeeze their users for every nickel (as demonstrated here). They will also monetize your data in ways that you probably don't want.
Teams chat is pretty bad, I agree. But it does have these benefits:
> Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.
Not for long, at least for the EU and I assume for us in the EEA. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
I didn't make the decision, the company I worked for did. I was asked to come up with a way to help make the process smooth.
I don't know their exact reasons, probably budget related since they were already using O365.
I can nearly guarantee it wasn't because Teams offers a better user experience. :D
PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.
I agree, but I don't think they were using the PDFs programmatically.
I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.
Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?
Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.
So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).
Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.
IIRC, you have to do something called a "compliance export," which just like any other compliance feature (SSO, HIPAA BAA, audit logs, etc.) usually requires the highest plan. It's designed to add some extra friction so admins can't just add themselves to a DM from the main UI like they could with a channel, but it is possible.
If you think anything you do on your work computer or saas accounts is private I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
why the extra step of making them into PDFs?
We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.
Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.
There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.
It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.
Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.
One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.
Human readable format at rest, I assume.
PDF is definitely not a human-reable format.
In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...
Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.
Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.
And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.
Zulip is awesome too. On prem.
What do you like about Zulip? Any drawbacks that you tolerate? Considering it for on-prem but would love to have some real-world feedback.
Used it for about 2 years at a growing startup. What I liked:
* Threads are way better than in Slack. They're top level instead of just a bolted on afterthought. This means all your various conversations scale way better and are way easier to find than in Slack. I can't overstate this enough, it's a killer feature and genuinely improves the overall organisation of your communications
* Font size is just slightly smaller. My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I still think they get the balance of legibility and information density spot on, whereas Slack feels cartoony in comparison.
* Search felt a little better, I can't exactly put my finger on why or how, just that finding things in Slack always feels comparable to the iOS Mail search feature: very basic.
Drawbacks:
* There are less out of the box integrations I think.
Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.
this is what we're doing :)
Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?
See discussions below in this HN thread.[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...
[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again
You'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.
For what it's worth, Zulip has a Mattermost data import tool, and communities are an important use case when we set product direction.
While I can't promise we won't ever change our exact monetization strategy, we're not venture-funded, and thus are immune to the usual enshittification pressures. https://zulip.com/values/ has some context.
(I lead the Zulip project)
Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"
It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P
(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
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.
Please 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
Slack 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?
The question is at what point the community response stops being beneficial and starts being harmful to the community itself.
I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.
But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.
My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.
As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.
It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!
* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.
I think there's a reasonable question about whether this was really an accident or something deliberate that they walked away from after bad PR.
Fixing the immediate problem is only step one. It's reasonable to ask for accountability and that they tell us about what they're changing going forward.
I use hanlon's razor here. Or perhaps a Bus Factor. Someone envoying for this situation got laid off or left, there wasn't proper documentation to track the issue, someone else picked up a warning in their feed and they launched out an email as they'd normally do, without reading into the context of the situation.
Their envoy is out of the loop so when Hack Club tries to respond they are at best rejected as some spurned rouge customer, and at worst completely ignored as they fail to reach anyone who has the power to properly look into it. So they have to go nuclear and make things public just to get the attention of a billion dollar corporation.
The fix, if any of this speculation is accurate, is indeed cultural. One counter to the current culture of tech trying to lay off as much as they can and letting Customer Service rot on the wayside. These PR crises were long determined as an "acceptable risk" of such cuts.
I don't think our engineer quoting Rob upstream has anything directly to do with this (maybe Rob does, but that's too speculative even for this post), but I do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America. This is indeed endemic at multiple companies, not just Slack. I hear this is one of many reasons companies prefer to deal with Chinese companies; these kinds of CS slip ups just doesn't happen in their culture as regularly as the US.
> do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America
In a culture of worshipping ARR you’ll need to put a price tag on everything you find shameful or it won’t happen.
I don't know about "accountability" - that word tends to get weaponized, and I'm not sure who is accountable to internet commenters or why we internet commenters feel they are accountable to us. But of course it's fine to ask what happened, what will be changed, etc. That's orthogonal to the rage thing though.
Well, e.g. I am at a nonprofit using Slack and would rather not get rugpulled in the future. So I'm particularly interested in any evidence that Slack can give that this was an isolated, unintentional circumstance and won't happen again.
Absolutely, and I see nothing wrong with that at all. My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.
> My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.
From what I can tell the "tar-and-feather thing" is outrage directed at Slack and its CXOs, rather than the poor guy who happens to be reposting a message from the CPO.
Please don't let your moderator's concern for injury to individual people blind you to the fact that the outrage triggered by outrageous conduct is directed at the outrageous company and its officers, rather than at individual folks who aren't in a position with any real power.
Sorry but I can't agree with this framing. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293818.
I don't see how my comment above could be interpreted as any sort of personal attack or tar-and-feather behavior towards the person I replied to. This is a discussion about a bad business practice at a major company, and that is what these concerns are voiced against, not any one individual person who is acting as a spokesperson.
I interpreted it that way based on lots of past experience with the dynamic I wrote about upthread. I believe you that you didn't intend it to come across as hostile! The problem is that intent doesn't communicate itself, especially in short critical comments. The way I usually put it is "the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
I apologize for using your comment as a place to hang a whole generic thing about mobs and whatnot—I certainly didn't mean it about you personally (or even your post) - it's a shared group phenomenon for sure, and I could have made that clearer.
As an internet commenter, I expect vendors to be accountable to us precisely because we provide them free marketing in exchange for, well, attention of us, and our fellow commenters and readers.
In my days of heading R&D for a regional social networking site, we discovered that first ~100k of our users were both the most valuable ones, due to the extent of their interaction with the site, and due to the fact that their risk tolerance for our /new/ product meant they would also tolerate future products. As such, that "first wave" of community around a product - is - the wave the creates the market for the product.
In case of Slack - they were taking that goodwill for granted. And the community's outrage called that bluff. It highlighted to other readers (like myself, I don't use Slack anymore so never paid attention to the ownership change) that it's now part of Salesforce (and that's a negative signal for me, might be positive for others); that it got pretty dubious business practices (as others in similar situation to OP have spoken up); and that none of the CXOs' committed to meaningful (from my and community's perspective) responses - post mortems; blast radius; accountability; data export.. which means either they don't have the power to make such commitments (wouldn't be the case pre-acquisition), or don't want to make them. Another negative signal.
Wow one of the most insightful takes I've read in a long time, hidden in the depths of a HN thread.
The mechanism you talk about is all too real, and it can be semi-consciously exploited. A bit off-topic, but the way genocides happen is via a similar mechanism. A group is depicted as base, a disease, faults are attributed to it. It becomes a moral imperative to clean the body.
This feeling is thus rationalized, and people start to reinforce each other's conviction. It becomes a twisted status game: the more you lean into the mentality, the higher you rank. Often times the goal isn't even to "address" the original trigger, it's to show your peers your approval and distance yourself from "those people". They the immoral, we the moral.
The job isn't finished if a complaint has to go viral every time slack has an oversight and threatens to delete nonprofit chat data within 7 days. The comment you're calling unprocessed rage and tar-and-feathering just said it's more than a simple mistake. If anything your comments have been harsher to individuals.
Yeah I see how I could have given that impression, now that you say it. We do try to be careful not to single out or pile on specific users, but there's always more to learn about that.
> the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage... It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob.
This is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.
Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
Thank you!
Sure! you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll do my best. Specific questions are easier to answer than general ones :)
@dang I trust you are writing or will eventually write a book about your time here and what you’ve taken from it. I hope I hear about it!
HN moderation is routinely put in front of the most interesting dilemmas! Your response is, of course, sensible. Let's hope that if Slack does something similar to another non-profit, then it will rise again on the top of the front page, so that it doesn't end up being a story of "I got my free pass because I was lucky enough that the press talked about me", when others get a similar treatment, without the deserved PR nightmare that comes with it.
I mean, objectively, unless it was an honest mistake, which we can generously assume because this is HN, this was a really cheap shot, worthy of Broadcom and friends.
> Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something.
how do you know they're "showing up to fix something" and not simply servicing the "10% returns" end of a widespread scheme to shake down customers? This has every bit the look of "shake all the low-paying customers down as much as possible, if one of them manages to raise too much awareness, act like it was an isolated incident".
It matters a lot of this is an isolated incident or if this is par for the course; in the latter case, responding to those customers that were lucky enough to go viral is just part of the scheme proceeding as planned.
I don't know, of course. What I do know is the effect of repeatedly assuming the worst about other people and pounding them with unprocessed rage, which is what internet indignation is all about. The effect is that it poisons community. Since we want a good community, we should avoid doing that here.
I suppose people get automatically annoyed because who the owner of Slack is. It is reasonable to assume bad practices if the company is too large to care, have multiple prior bad incidents etc - that is why people automatically assume guilt with companies like Oracle, Comcast, Salesforce etc etc. If the company in question was a small 50 person outfit or unknown, people might assume it was an honest mistake or at least give benefit of the doubt.
Not saying it is right or wrong - just pointing out that people's patience is in short supply when it comes to mega corps, simply because of their very bad track records...
Yes. No argument here about that.
I agree that we shouldn’t pile on and assume the worst. However, multiple comments have asked what Slack will do to ensure this doesn’t happen again, which is important pressure to put on the corporation so that they can show (and not just tell us) that they truly are committed to fixing this problem.
This was their answer to that question:
> We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I don't think we're going to get a different answer if we ask again, and frankly I wouldn't expect one.
Yes, and that's the frustrating part of it all. I'm tired of turning the other cheek for companies that are ransacking us financially and exhausting us emotionally. It shouldn't take a public drama for a business to be proressional. Clearly leaving it as "we'll fix it, oppsie" isn't far enough.
I dont know that we should assume the worst but you are assuming the best, that's what irks me more here. my position is that we should be skeptical and demand (politely, civilly, that is all fine) more information about what is the nature of this mistake, why did it happen, and what do we know about the same mistake happening elsewhere? the parent post was just "this is a mistake, we're fixing it, giggles", I would argue that's insufficient.
They are not "other people", they are company offering services.
Every HN user is a person regardless of where they work, and everyone here is posting first as a human being, same as you and I are. That's how we all need to relate to each other. Work affiliations don't obviate that, and there's no substantive point or question that can't be posted this way.
I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3
About being used to pressure companies, but not TOO much so they keep pushing that button?
About learning to relate to each other better. Doesn't that sound ok?
I'm pretty tired of things "sounding" okay. That was in 2024.
2025 has told me that actions speak louder than words. I don't really see much engagement on trying to "relate to each other" on this platform lately. Not from the community nor those who moderate it. Just a facsimile of trying to maintain decorum in an age of chaos
----
Rant aside: a company isn't a person to relate to. They are made of people, but those people clearly make no attempt to relate either. This is a PR response, which despite having "relations" in it is not an attempt to engage with the community nor promote curiosity. So I will treat it as such.
But staff showing up and simply quoting a person higher in the org only shows they’re parroting.
Anything personal would have been appreciated, especially in this context. Maybe “I’m one of the thousands that work here but this means something to me…”?
Actually even a professional stance that showed concern: “One of our shared company values states…”
Sadly Jamie’s response didn’t build any trust of Slack from me…
It's not your place to attempt to moderate perfectly reasonable posts just because the overall "feel" of the conversation seems off to you. The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.
As an aside, there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by on the daily, usually the older the user somehow the more leeway there seems to be, so I'd suggest you focus your moderating attention on that.
The mods' job is to prevent the community system from falling into its failure modes, and/or to jig it out of them when it does (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In that sense, posting like I did there is very much our place. (Not personally, of course, but in the role.) Whether I pulled it off well or not is a separate question.
> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by
I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to see it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
> The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.
Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.
Moreover, 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.
Here's the thing: the post says it was written in haste so I imagine they wrote it before they spoke to anyone at Slack. There is no way to verify malice.
It would have been better to first reach out to Slack and get a confirmation and document that. This way we would have evidence and Slack could not pull the oops card.
counterpoint: in software mistakes at scale is sorta what we do
They'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.
"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.
i 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.
Salesforce is in the business of forcing sales.
I see what you did there. Upvoted for something or other.
Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?
We 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.
> 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.
The special rate was charity.
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?
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.
> 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.
No one is ever going to pay per-seat for tens of thousands of teenage volunteers. If you're an unusual customer (nonprofit, with lots of volunteers and program people in the slack) you might end up with a long term special deal recognizing those circumstances (charging you for employees but not others).
The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it. (Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of future decision makers instead of Discord where these users all naturally congregate was a major win!)
To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit, is messed up.
> 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)
Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
It doesn't matter that an alternate method of counting would be a lot more. They paid a reasonable amount for what they got.
$200k for this service is a joke, not the 'real' price.
> Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
Slack was obviously unsuitable for them because Slack does not offer what they wanted (free for non-employees), but the decision maker blundered on. And now they want sympathy.
> Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
> The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
And in doing so Slack added that business model. And seemed happy about it.
> Slack does not offer what they wanted
They offered it to them.
> And now they want sympathy.
They deserve plenty of sympathy for Slack not giving them any reasonable warning as they torpedoed the deal. And it's not like they were draining Slack's resources or doing anything that made this an emergency.
Yes, that is correct.
> I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
Well, that's what you have lawyers for.
Otherwise, agreed with your comment.
No, you don't. You have lawyers to assist managers in legal matters. But you can't simply throw a contract at a lawyer and ask "What do you think?" All the terms need to be understood by the manager. It is however reasonable to ask a lawyer "What does this say in normal language?" and "Is there any provision in this thing that sticks out as being really out of line or would trip us up if we had to litigate it?" Understanding a contract is not difficult. I've negotiated contracts with some of the largest companies in the world over my career and it only worked because I was also reading the contracts and interacting with the lawyer as a partner.
You have a lawyer to warn you about things you might not notice in your contract. But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.
> But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.
TBH, in this specific case you don't even need to read the fine print to know that getting a $195k discount on a $200k bill is only a temporary thing!
In 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.
> 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).
That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.
Well, 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.
You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
Depends 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.
The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future
"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.
You just explained why EU software startups do not cause VCs to rain money down on them.
I'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.
I have a key for 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.
So you know - campfire is now open source.
https://x.com/dhh/status/1963675999012552970
It's free now, they released it for free in most recent Railsconf.
Sad 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.
You 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.
Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
First 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.
> 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...
>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.
This 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.
is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?
Everything 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?
GDPR (and similar laws, like CCPA) require companies to provide a data export when requested. Probably this could be used here?
If every user did a gdpr request perhaps
I 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).
Why not? It is data about you, technically speaking.
I saw the post title and immediately thought of you guys - really scary situation! Very happy to hear that Slack reached out with a solution.
Have you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?
Hi, 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?
Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
That's hard on a fast deadline.
maybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.
they 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.
yall should look into migrating away from Slack after this incident even though they "fixed" the billing issue.
Glad 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.
Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?
This is very well explained in the linked post.
Can you quote it? From what I can gather the linked post doesn't mention Zulip
Zulip 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.
“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?
> 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?
Then they lose their 11 years of history
But they said their instance would be deactivated which is what I'm asking about.
Does it stay active w/ the ability to continue to use it minus the features of the paid account or is it shut down completely.
Probably 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.
The 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".
> The free 90 day version is worthless IMO
I strongly disagree. The company I work at (sub-50 people) has never paid for Slack over our entire history (founded in 2009).
It's chat and it works fine. That's all it needs to be for us. We don't need to switch to IRC or one of the other countless chat apps.
We're never going to need to be indignant that Slack is suddenly asking us for more money and then rush to migrate. When they shut down the free tier, we'll take our ephemeral chat somewhere else.
I 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.
Yeah this. Do not pay for something that is absolutely integral to your operations, when viable alternatives exist.
Happy to help, did you consider 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.
I’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.
we 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.
Slack'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.
I 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
That sounds quite a bit like fraud.
Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.
They 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?
Weirdly, there is an exception to fraud if the jury/judge believes that in that situation, no reasonable person would believe what they are saying, it is "mere puffery". This is why some famous, wealthy and powerful people in America today are so hard to catch up on fraud, because they lie so often and so completely that "no one" would really rely on their word. And yet, they are clearly powerful because a lot of people rely on their word.
https://www.bloomberglaw.com/external/document/XC5P9MQG00000...
“Puffery” isn’t that odd; it’s all about context.
We want people to tell the truth, obviously, but we also don’t want to litigate obvious hyperbole. It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without bringing in a whole team of UX researchers and bakery historians to calculate how well sliced bread was received and whether Tide Pods (or whatever) are a big enough improvement to meet that bar.
> It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without [...]
Possible for you, yes. But I think it's perfectly fine to have a different set of rules for different people based on incentives.
You could bring in a whole team of UX researchers, or a promo copy writer with slightly more originality than sliced white bread. Then they could make a claim or comparison that's trivial to verify. Instead of meaningless obvious (to most people) hyperbole.
You can't lie to people, and must have some evidence to back up any promotional claim made seems like a reasonable rule for people with a financial incentive to lie or be misleading to the possible detriment of others.
But if you're really so offended by such a rule, perhaps the solution is "these claims have not been evaluated by [trade industry group] and this product is not intended to treat or cure any disease, missing feature, required business need or other software bug!" Then you can lie as much as any snake oil salesman.
> we also don’t want to litigate obvious hyperbole
I think we do!
Anyone except an American judge can see that this is intentional.
By the spirit of the law, yes, it likely is fraud. I doubt you could argue it is by the letter of it, though. Normally fraud involves lying to someone to get them to enter into a business relationship with you, not to keep one. Besides, regardless of how many people were using specific features of it, the service is what it is. This wouldn't be unlike you calling your ISP to cancel your subscription and they asking you if you're sure you want to cancel such a great service. If the service factually sucks ass compared to other providers wouldn't make it fraud. All that matters is that it meets the specifications that were sold to you.
They’re not telling you its great tho. To continue your analogy, you call your ISP to cancel and they say “are you sure? Two other people are using it as we speak!” and you live alone knowing that’s impossible.
It wasn't an analogy, it was a comparison. I wasn't trying to produce an analogous situation. My point is that a company lying to you about their service while you're trying to cancel wouldn't necessarily constitute fraud. If the ISP lying to you in the way I said wouldn't be fraud, then "they are verifiably false statements made for the purpose of monetary gain" does not compellingly argue that Slack's lie is fraud. An example of something that would be fraudulent: "stay with us and we'll give you 1000 AI credits", but then if you don't cancel they only give you 100.
> Normally fraud involves lying to someone to get them to enter into a business relationship with you, not to keep one.
There is no distinction of the sort in the law. e.g. California:
(3) “Fraud” means an intentional misrepresentation, deceit, or concealment of a material fact known to the defendant with the intention on the part of the defendant of thereby depriving a person of property or legal rights or otherwise causing injury.
OK, well, by that definition it's not fraud, then. If I lie to you to convince you to not cancel a service you're already paying for then I'm not depriving you of anything. You're willingly continuing to trade your property for a service. For it to be fraud I would have to trick you into giving me something for nothing.
I don't understand your logic, and your statement isn't true.
Fraud doesn’t require someone to be "tricked into giving something for nothing." Courts have long recognized that it’s also fraud when one party induces another to act (or refrain from acting) by relying on false or concealed information.
That’s why there’s piles of case law on fraudulent inducement (getting someone to stay in a contract by making untrue statements) and fraudulent concealment (hiding negative information so they remain in the relationship). In both situations, the injured party continues performing under the contract to their detriment because of deception.
The key element is reliance on a misrepresentation.
It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.
On the contrary it is extremely natural that they do this - when the only thing that matters is revenue and morals are just a roadblock this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do
What's the difference? Ransomware gangs aren't evil, they just want to make easy money and don't care about morals. That is also the definition of a for-profit company.
Oh so there’s a history of dark patterns too? Colour me surprised.
Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).
"This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware"
This is basically it. Nobody frames it this way. But once you see it lol.. your eyes open up to what really goes on behind the scenes at Slack et al.
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?
Thank you for the correction! I meant to type "the pricing where the buyer's remaining profit is exactly zero", and I'm not sure whether I accidentally deleted some text or what. I was pretty tired.
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to "difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll understand their intended meaning.
This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....
https://hackclub.com/
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!
Damn that’s so cool. When I heard about that kid programming OSS on his phone it really put me to shame complaining about my work load.
On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish open source people would have opted to get him something more free than a MacBook.
He choose the laptop for durability because he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh. People didn't pick a non-free laptop without consulting him.
A ThinkPad might have also been an excellent choice, but hope the MacBook serves him well!
Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.
Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.
Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Yes, fair, it’s off-topic in here.
Framework?
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...
Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
>he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.
It is not about their decisions, it is about their bs about the need for high reliability
About… the teenage boy’s… “bs” about his preferences? About his supporters recognizing his free labor, wanting to reward it, asking him to make a choice for himself and him making it?
This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
Bro. Just let the kid have his MacBook.
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in they've created.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
> in terms of engagement
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
I imagine that they mean engagement as in, "how many people in the company or group actually use the software on a regular basis".
Moved on to matrix? Many did... and they're all realizing matrix doesn't actually work long term. There's only the synapse server and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks. That means the db just grows and grows until it's too expensive, or too slow (re:IO), to work. That's why the matrix.org homeserver has a 55TB db. That's why many long running IRC servers gave up on running matrix bridges because it simply became too computationally/resource costly to run the simple text based server even if they loved the features.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
> There's only the synapse server
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
> and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks.
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/purge_...
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio...
https://github.com/matrix-org/rust-synapse-compress-state
Synapse server is the only server that does the things matrix says it can do. All those others don't. Notice only two of those say 'stable' and only one, synapse, implements the full set of features. Also can't switch between them.
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
I'm from 1987, are you sure? And I was talking about Jabber, not IRC.
> And I was talking about Jabber, not IRC.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
No, I like IRC, but IM has different uses. IRC is for technical/non-private/random connections to roam around, like going a public place IRL. IM it's for personal stuff, as talking between relatives, close friends, word colleagues and so on.
IRC can be used for private communication, in fact it was the protocol for private communication used by for example warez scene groups years ago.
IRC, because of its simplicity, can be layered, so adding encryption is trivial if we want to hide from the server (FISH). By default IRC servers show hostname of the user, but that depends on the network; for example LinkNet hides it.
Right, well, the project needed something like IRC / Discord / Slack, where random people could just show up, ask questions, hang out, whatever. You know, engage with the community.
"Lots of clients" -- that's actually a problem. "Oh, you want to have a quick chat with experts in our community? First, here's a list of 50 IRC clients, half of which haven't been updated since 2003, all of which have different advantages and disadvantages. Go through and choose one and go through all the configuration. Oh, and you wanted to be able to read something someone wrote while your laptop lid was shut? Like, maybe you're not in the same timezone as many of the contributors? You're going to need to find an always-on server and set up this IRC bouncer. Also, because of spam, we only allow registered users to post, so you're going to need to type these runes in the command-line and make yourself a certificate."
Matrix certainly had its warts when we switched, but it was still an immediate quality-of-life improvement, particularly for newcomers.
I mean, HAM radio is basically a chat room with an entrance exam; there's certainly something nice about having communities full of people with that sort of filter up front. And, for a charity designed to teach kids to code, maybe helping them munge around with IRC clients is a bonus. But for a normal community, IRC isn't the right tool for the job.
This. It is mind boggling to see an organization that teaches tech related stuff be so clueless about the dangers of proprietary software, cloud services and walled gardens.
is... was it Ellis island?
How about https://once.com/campfire
Second this. I'm fond of just enough principle, and this is exactly that.
Or better this: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
I'm confused. In the FAQ they mention issuing licenses for self-hosting, but the code base in MIT licensed so why would you need an issued license?
I am somewhat guessing here: They used to sell this app (for, idk, $300 I think?) until recently. The FAQ might not have been updated in full to reflect the fact that it's now open source.
Sure, so 5 years from now they will be in the exact same situation.
Ok, whats your suggestion?
I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
[1] https://revolt.chat/
I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)
I was going to suggest the same. Why would it not be free? I would expect it to be free. I don't think running a server costs anything.
Yet.
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an organisation like this could legitimately need.
we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to users.
Going from a greedy corporation to another greedy corporation is not a good idea.
Discord is pretty horrible when compared to Slack… can’t change the tiny font size for starters
you can literally change the font size to up to 24px and then double it again if that isn't enough using zoom level in discord
There is no way to change the font size in the Discord app on iOS
Even under accessibility you can only change things like contrast
Of course you can change the font and font size.
Show me how I change them in the iOS apps…
Not an Apple user.
A quick Google search says that for iOS 15+:
>To change per-app settings for any application, including Discord, on an iPhone or iPad, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Per-App Settings. Tap Add App, select Discord from the list, and then customize settings like Display & Text Size to alter the app's appearance or behavior without affecting other applications.
Discord used to ignore those settings but it seems to pay some attention to them now (tried it before and it didn’t work)
Unfortunately it’s still somewhat screwed up with the sidebar font being too big compared to the message text
> a nonprofit teaching coding to kids
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...
I am a teenager and I approve this statement!
Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>
They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.
Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is done, but do check our website: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
Slack used to allow you to connect your own clients using open standards. And then they suddenly didn't.
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
Not being funny, but I can migrate from Zulip SaaS to Zulip Self-hosted in about 45 minutes. The limitation is the speed of my internet.
I know this, because I've done it.
Similarly a migration from self-hosted to SaaS gitlab (though, not back).
Perfect is the enemy of good, but man, it can be pretty close to perfect if you choose your vendors properly.
Discord server it is! /s (but not really)
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
Slack doesn't even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF's part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (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.
Hi, 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.
Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they'd charge more
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.
Noshareholder would be more honest.
The people in charge are getting a very modest salary for a developer, and a extremely modest salary for someone running a 10m/yr organization.
so they’re profiting, glad we agree
A non-profit does not mean it does not spend money on anyone's salary. It means the corporate entity does not make a profit.
That doesn't really matter?
It does matter. People working for a non-profit should not work for free. It's completely acceptable for a non-profit to have an income and assets. Revenue may increase and it would be irresponsible to immediately increase expenses to match when they can conservatively plan for the future.
This is said knowing nothing about the company in question, just from my own experience working for a non-profit. Employees still need to be paid.
The amount they get paid shouldn't matter at all. Nobody said anything about not paying people lol
The OP said if the founder is getting paid a salary it shouldn't be called a non-profit.
That is literally what the OP is arguing that people who found non-profit organization shouldn't be paid even a modest salary for their work.
I wouldn't say that a salary is profiteering from a non profit. It's the cost of doing (non-profit) business.
So if I got paid $50 to write this reply I wouldn't have profited from writing it?
"people in charge are literally profiting"
This raises some interesting questions. Would you expect to see people in charge of this org, performing the day-to-day jobs, to work without receiving any pay? When you say the people are profiting, do you mean the organization is receiving more money each year than they are spending? That is certainly the goal of all orgs, businesses, churches, soup kitchens, and government NGO's.
It's an interesting question. I suppose they could take on jobs elsewhere in the private sector, and then perform these jobs for Hack Club at zero cost to the company. I would say it comes down to time spent. How big is Hack Club? If it can be managed for 10 minutes worth of work a day, then perhaps that should be donated time. If it requires more than 8+ hours a day. And if the work is specialized then it def needs the right person there, WITH the expertise to run this company --- then they should receive pay for his/her work.
Looks like it's time for them to sponsor an open source Slack-killer.
The revenue is from contributions
Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
I worked in parallel with Sun Microsystems (prior acquisition) IBM and Oracle. All 3 were horrible in that regard. They all offered cheap services, and waited until roots were deep enough; then they would change the billing scheme multiplying fees by up to 25
Sun was always fair to me, so much so that I feel like it's unfair to lump them together.
I used Solaris on Sun Fire machines and the support was unmatched, we got massive tome manuals that described in excruciating detail exactly how the system worked in almost all scenarios and a deep programming reference.
They never upselled us on anything, or changed the price.. until Oracle bought them and jacked the support costs up (though, to be perfectly fair, they ought to jack the support costs of old systems up).
Microsoft was _awesome_ to deal with as a small company and/or an educational institution. They had special programs for startups where you could get basically anything for free, and their business side was a pleasure to deal with.
They very much understood the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" mantra.
Marc Benioff is an acolyte of Ellison, he learned and uses the same tactics.
Benioff is Ellison's protégé. Why expect anything less?
> this behavior reminds me of Oracle
I'm sure Salesforce is terrified of growing their market cap by 3x
Funny because Salesforce grew out of Oracle and initially sought to become the anti-Oracle. What was their pitch? Rent your software?
Have you not seen Oracle's price lately?
Salesforce has succeeded in spite of Marc Benioff - but I do wonder how long that can last.
[flagged]
Oracle soon owns part of TikTok. So do they own teens? Will teens be liability?
Brace yourself for the wave of paid teen influencers promoting Oracle.
"I can't wait to yeet my expense reports into Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, no cap"
I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.
It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
Though maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.
Yes, they earned their Stallman degree.
Hey, I think we agree on something.
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
That could be done so that it doesn't look like extortion though
Absolutely, it's just there's no commercial pressure on Salesforce company structure to evolve towards valuing the feelings of small clients.
Slack has always had a bottom-up sales funnel (i.e. the "land and expand" "shadow IT" model), so I'm not sure this is true.
Slack has been acquired. It's the same with all of these big tech companies. There is a period after acquisition where things appear to stay the same. The reality is that the real work is now happening. Operations are being studied to understand how to fold the acquisition into the parent company.
The shadow IT model isn't the dominant one in the space where Salesforce play. They used that to a degree too when they were small, but they now lean towards enterprise sales. Shadow IT is sold as a risk by them. Want something secure, safe, and compliant? Work with us because we'll sign up to these things contractually (even if delivery is questionable.)
This means that a slack salesperson has to choose between targeting a department and pissing off IT versus working on a company-level deal. This changes behavior significantly. It also changes lots of the economic expectations. Previously, these little deals here and there could add up. On top, you might get credit from driving engagement. Now you carry a much larger quota where engagement is important in practice, but not in how sales is executed.
This drives the behavior you see here. Someone is reevaluating each of the current deals with this new lens. In practice, they can maximize revenue with these bullying tactics. Many times, in the enterprise space, it's better for a customer to be cut off, or give up, even if this is temporary. The intention is for the customer to return and agree to different terms even if the financials are adjusted to something more favorable.
They are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.
I've worked at two companies that use Telegram. Honestly, telegram provided everything that we needed as a software development team.
Are there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.
I did it for a few years after I graduated. It paid about a 10% premium over what other dev jobs in the area paid, and you never had to do anything super technically challenging, but you were pretty much at the whims of the sales org without any kind of product management in place. Plus the owner of the stack you worked with was openly antagonistic to the fact that developers had to be involved at all, even though all of their "no-code" tools introduced complexity that required developers to be involved as soon as you did anything more interesting than whatever was in the demo.
So yeah I made some money but I'd die before I was a salesforce dev again.
> you were pretty much at the whims of the sales org without any kind of product management in place.
In my sample size of 2, this is always the case no matter where you work where the majority of revenue is derived by sales.
Makes me filthy rich doesn’t imply I like it.
Margin Call is a great movie.
I imagine and hope this is what a lot of people who work for our tech giants thinks, especially around the social medias....
People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
If you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad.
But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.
It's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.
Hush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to serve a simple status page.
I'm an HPC admin, I can (and will) make you serve this page from NIC's unused core. I need these cores for streaming cat videos.
Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home.
Runs Prime95 like a baws
I’d love a self-hostable, in-browser Access. Preferably Access 97.
There’s a couple of open source projects that get almost close but not quite. It’s like a number of them have 20 to 50% of what you need.
I agree that it would be a very useful product.
Something like appsmith gets pretty close
Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.
IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.
I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.
But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...
As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.
Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.
The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
> The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
This is a thought I'm having lot as I get older. I've taken to judging people on how much what they say they work for in the world aligns with the profile of who they choose to work for. Not so much for unskilled in minimum wage work, but massively so for anyone who works in tech.
It pains me to see so many engineers younger than me convinced that they're bringing around positive changes with their career whilst working for companies and people who are demonstrably against everything they claim they're working for.
I feel sorry for all the psychology majors, that went to school, to learn to help people, and are now designing dark patterns.
They are likely making a lot more than they would, otherwise, though.
It speaks to motivation generally, I think. Most people just want to be able to take care of themselves and the people closest to them; they (and this includes me most of the time) don't have the bandwidth to think beyond paying next month's rent.
Can't remember the source of this quote regarding software developers: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
We're all in the same boat.
Counterpoint though, they’re sometimes exactly what they’re described as.
Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this
Except those examples are specifically and obviously not true, except maybe Larry Ellison.
Indeed - once he took the mask off, Musk turned out to be much worse than what he initially seemed.
Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.
Sure, pretty much anyone in a sales position that has had to use something else. Salesforce is bad, their competition is trash.
My sales people love it.
Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.
Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.
Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.
Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?
I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?
The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.
But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.
So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."
It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.
This thread captures the hatred for salesforce well: it is aggressively sales first. It's the antithesis of modern engineering culture that looks to provide value to customers and tech first by putting them first.
Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.
Spot on!
Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.
This is at a fortune 500 company.
Never used it, so I don't hate it yet.
But they use the dreamy McConaughey for their ads, so they must be a good company. /s
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies
>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.
I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
You’d think they failed based on the description given earlier. But that doesn’t sound like failure to me…
As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
And then Broadcom bought CA and doubled down on it.
Some of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.
I 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).
This is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.
You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.
Not everywhere. Even when it's allowed it can result in shadow bans. Seems a whole lot easier to self-censor everywhere than to track who gives value to the word f**.
Fuck that noise. The places that shadow ban and encourage self-censorship do not deserve your traffic nor your content.
Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.
You’re also allowed to say f_ck.
It’s the internet and you can decide what you want to type.
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
Salesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s in an epic doom loop.
On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble.
Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.
Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.
> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.
Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.
The thought that Benioff could be the Ellison of the 2040s is kinda nuts
That's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.
What better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.
You 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.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building monopolistic “trusts” was avoiding “ruinous competition”, the nation would be better off with a few big monopolies
And I'm saying that the competition is 'ruinous' for the companies involved, yes. But it's great for workers, customers and shareholders.
Oh, absolutely. Financial elites in the US only like Adam Smith when it suites them.
I have no idea what you mean by "questionable economics" here. You seem to be saying that it seems true, but doesn't conform to your values.
The economics are questionable in a moral sense - monopolies are widely considered to be good for the monopoly's shareholders and bad for everyone else.
No, it's questionable in that competition might be ruinous for the company, but it's great for workers, customers, shareholders and innovation.
No. I'm saying that he's wrong. Competition is great for innovation, workers, customers and shareholders.
The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.
Huh? Economics as a discipline is great. Orthodox economics is exactly what I'm drawing on with my comment.
> But does it really matter?
I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.
And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.
Yeah but the problem here is the short time alert
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Just seems more efficient to me.
coders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that has worked on writing code for it hates it
Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters". They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
True whitehats are cucks, change my mind.
Indeed, for for-profit companies.
They too can buy the exploits off the market as well. Just, the price for the company is 25x higher than individual costs.
If corporations can price discriminate on non-EEOC metrics, so can I.
Just wait till they learn about Broadcom!
And yet entirely predictable.
Who cares? Managers just bagged fat bonus and jump ship when it goes down. The whole world is like this now /s.
Since 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.
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
This is so important these days. A lot of project send users to discord, slack for documentation and help but they are not made for this purpose. Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation. I can't even use search engines to search that.
> Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentation
I just wanted to highlight this. I am so happy seeing this written down explicitly and finally.
Throughout the years I struggled so much finding relevant and accurate information about a feature of a product because it was scattered in chat channels, inadequate for providing reliable data (out of date or uncertain staleness, evolving or straight up wrong suggestions found, tangential only, patial, ...). Big names do it (Unity3D, DevExpress, ...). To make the matter worst both official support personel and power users promote its use, defend its use against critique to the last blood, despite of the obvious shortcomings and unreliability for average users. It is just the lazy excuse of providing the necessary knowledge.
It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally.
So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?
Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message.
The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.
> intentionally engineered "lack of time"
This is so true.
And it is making the industry eating itself.
The purpose of the software is not profit, but usability. Profit for the organization/owner is a tool to achive that, in some instances (it is very valuable, but not essential).
The primary self-serving focus of bigger and quicker profit leads to serious erosion of trust in technology, making the life of those building a livelihood on top of it shaky at best.
Time for a good librarian app to pull it out of Slack and organize it into an enterprise-managed archive?
You might enjoy this :
https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509.
I do.
I'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.
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
You can deploy it self-hosted without paying any fee, so you control your data much more.
Last time I checked they cripple the self-hosted version, asking to subscribe for enterprise plan here and there. Source: deployed their chat locally a couple of weekends ago. Overall, I liked their Slack clone, they this one was a red flag to me. Now I’m not sure we want to deploy this, but I know very little alternatives. Zulip, but it cripples its self-hosted version too. It allows just 10 mobile users (notifications). Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.
Hi Matthew, thanks for the clarification. Then, Matrix is the only player who does not cripple self-hosted instances, I assume.
Matrix is the protocol, so doesn’t do implementations (just like w3c doesn’t do web servers any more). But the distribution from Element indeed is self-host first, and doesn’t break stuff if you’re airgapped. The paywall (such as it is) is that features which empower the enterprise over the user are paid, whereas one which empower the end-user are FOSS.
Mattermost is AGPLv3. You can deploy the whole stack and own your data without paying a cent to Mattermost the company.
How are you expecting the devs to get paid with zero incentive for customers to do so?
Mattermost is open-core software: you can self-host and they can't turn you off or raise the price.
What's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally being usable under Apache 2 terms
That's how they describe themselves: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost
> Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
Interesting. Notably, they also call themselves "open source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit that gives no explanation: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.
Notably, they do have some "source-available" code that goes into the enterprise release, at https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/server/...
This mainly seems to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a relatively recent development). Until recently they also had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search)
So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and almost all features, are currently still open source.
It sounds like the enterprise release is not open source? When someone above says "The whole thing is AGPLv3," I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same "whole thing"?
I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.
Does 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'.
Matrix would be a better alternative
mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it's free...
Is 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.
Funny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky, especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality and the search just works for about everything.
What about the software nudging you to subscribe to their enterprise plans here and there? Did you turned off this, or just ignore?
I've literally never seen this in my self-hosted Mattermost. Where do you see it?
I afraid I nuked my installation already. There were insignificant features, like for their Playbook (or what the name is), where you are offered some extra feature, that goes with the enterprise plan. If I chose my self-hosted instance for some reason, I don’t really need that advertising in my interface all the time. I can understand the reason it’s there, but I don’t like it still.
Not much of an issue. Did this get more annoying in the newest versions?
First time I tested a self-hosted instance was a couple of weeks back. It was their official testing docker container. So perhaps there are versions without that, I don’t know. I assume you should be able to compile this without them, or at least fork the original project. Hence, I’m asking what’s about those banners in real world scenario.
> mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable
I'm quite sure they are open to pull-requests..
yawn it's very, very old to tell people "do it better else shut up", which is exactly what you did.
people can have an opinion you know. this is my opinion.
Zulip is awesome. Super easy to self host. Upgrades go very smoothly. Their thread title concept is great (though they are relaxing its requirement lately). The only thing you don't get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it's a bummer but that's what they came up with to monetize the project, as is their right. Paying $5000 for chat is ridiculous to me when such good alternatives exist.
Why would you not be able to get notifications? I use various FOSS apps (and even Whatsapp) on GrapheneOS without Google Play services and notifications work just fine.
Botom line is that's how they want to earn money and it's not supported in their official apps without a subscription. I believe all the plumbing is in place but you have to build and maintain your own push sever intermediary and clients and push server.
Still, crippling the self-hosted version feels like a red flag. Later on, they can easily introduce more features out of self-hosted version. That makes me feel more like ‘we’re business first, but we allow you plebs to contribute towards our success for free’ instead of ‘we’re business and we’re contributing into the community, and as a bonus, the community helps us back.’
The problem with push notifications is that they need to go through the app provider and incur costs for it, that's not really their fault. If they'd not charge for it, they'd still go through their servers and would lose them money. So putting it behind a paid service you hook up to your self-hosted instance seems fair.
If you want to avoid it you'd need to build patched versions of the app and distribute them yourself to your users, so you pay Google/Apple directly for notifications instead of going through Zulip.
Self-hosted ntfy¹ would be a cool alternative. Works really great for me.
¹ https://docs.ntfy.sh/
Curiously if you ask if they would consider properly supporting notifications from the mobile web version then the answer is always no. Pwa would be perfectly fine but its crippled on Zulip
If you read their announcement for the new paid subscription they do not hide the fact that this is first and foremost designed as a revenue source. One could potentially fork the clients and add such functionality. But they will not do it on their own clients.
I have been following that project for a long time. They are "good people". They want to make sure the project survives. I am bummed about that change and I could probably get the their notification service free if i asked for it (little bit involvement with some things) but I didn't. I respect their decision. Though of course I do have the same concerns as you. I just want to think it won't happen.
Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...).
And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip having monetization for self-hosted business use? (Mobile notifications have always been free for most communities, and we have discount programs for various use cases detailed on our pricing page).
Look, in 2025, and one should be very wary of rugpulls. But Zulip has no venture investors. I've personally funded the project for almost a decade now, so that it can operate in line with our values (https://zulip.com/values/).
I want to use applications that are ethically managed, self-hostable, privacy-supporting, open-source, and excellent. Zulip aims to be that kind of project, and even with all the community contributions that we've fostered, I don't see how we could maintain Zulip responsibly without our professional team.
Should it be a red flag for an open-source application to have monetization that charges businesses for using services operated by its professional team? Or would the red flag be a project that lacks a professional team who one can count on to maintain it responsibly?
Hey, thanks for reaching out and truly appreciate the feedback from the team, not someone random on the internet. When I say ‘red flag’ in this context I never mean comparing Zulip to Slack. For me personally (but I believe for most others too, especially right here) Slack was a no-go since about a decade ago. Slack is just a poster child of a huge massive gargantuan Red Flag. I’d never even consider using it in any possible scenario. Whilst Zulip was my _primary_ consideration to deploy for a small organisation (still more than 10 people). Alongside Mattermost and Matrix, who don’t have these limits. So this thing _feels_ like a red flag in comparison. Here, in sibling comments I do write about Mattermost too, with their nudges to buy Enterprise edition here and there, and everywhere. And about their new limits too. (For which there’s Mostly Matter now.)
This also is a massive red flag for me, and while I understand that they and you Zulip team has to support a professional team, and you have to do that, and you have every right of doing that, and I’m personally very supportive of this-— still, this move leaves the fear of ‘today this, tomorrow something else.’
Speaking of this very case of 10 mobile users limits, I have a few thoughts. First, it’s entirely possible that you communicate this piece not very well, as I had this impression that Mattermost and Matrix don’t do that, hence maybe it’s possible to host the whole thing on my own and have the notifications. Perhaps they just allow users to use their servers for that for free. This moment is unclear for me, and I had to do my research, which mostly failed, since I still do a guesswork here. I am left with this bitter taste that the issue is artificial on Zulip’s side. Again, not saying it’s your fault, I could be someone who did the research poorly. That was my weekend attempt, and I was super limited on time. Next time I may have more time for that research again (I plan to), but it would happen early next year.
Second, it was mentioned somewhere here as well, the active users strategy. You allow for 10 users, meaning if you’re small team or group, go ahead and use Zulip. But I am a part of an organisation who needs their chat, and they are about 100 people across the country (and the country is Ukraine, meaning they have bigger things to worry about than a chat). But among these 100 people most of them are drivers or cars maintenance team, they mostly need no company chat. If they would use it, it’s a couple of messages a day tops. However, there are managers, and they would use the chat very actively, all day long. They are either less than ten or more than ten (up to 15, 20). I not aware of the exact number of people, since in my city they have just three managers, plus two developers, so there are five people plus me who’d use the chat actively. But since there are others, and they need mobile notifications, we cannot consider Zulip (even when we are able to host in on our own entirely) for this, unless we pay. While the company is for-profit, I cannot even think of asking for anything, and understand the company is better to pay and support you. Yet in this very situation, I’m having hard time explaining it to the boss. He won’t pay for these drivers and cars maintenance teams, as they’re dead souls, technically. They are to receive some instructions and ok them, that’s 90% of the communication for them. So while I’d try my luck with pitching company chat (instead of just using WhatsApp or Facebook or Viber or Telegram), that makes sense only for active users, not for mostly idle users that won’t use the chat actively. And in this very situation, it’s mostly texts, so no heavy images or video calls.
Apart from that, your chat looks one of the best among self-hosted options, I plan at trying it with a group of friends, which is less than 10 people. Forgive me if all this is easily verifiable when you actually used the chat. I only deployed it locally to check the interface (was mostly okay), and researched on the perspectives of using it within a relatively big organisation.
Cheers!
I'm selfhosting rocket for a small team (https://www.rocket.chat/install). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.
The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.
Yeah, I must have read the whole article except that sentence, which is buried at the very end, after all the images.
If those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.
They are indeed of Slack but the 4th says: “As you have probably read, Hack Club is moving to Mattermost”. But not here to litigate it. It’s easy to miss if you skim.
> Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong.
A lot of the data people are worried about is their chat history, because Hack Club isn't really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it's also a community. So it's less about documentation and more about people's chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)
I think it is time we all start moving away from renting software back to owning it (or at the very least, owning a perpetual license). The subscription model is does not exist on a stable plateau. Every company that runs on a subscription model will (and must, by virtue of incentives) to attempt to "develop new revenue streams".
Perpetual licenses aren’t a panacea given that old software doesn’t have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of support is lacking.
Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?
Zulip is great
Campfire is definitely not FOSS: https://once.com/license
Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository.
https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
That's an outdated license web page dated 2024, see "Copyright © 2024" at the bottom.
The code was made free in 2025 per X post dated Sep 12, 2025 by Jason Fried [0], screenshot available [1].
A quote from Fried's tweet:
Here's a quote from https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICE... [0] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560[1] https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png
Why not Element/Matrix?
It seems to be a more popular and mature choice, and it is open source too.
There's really nothing like Slack in my uninformed opinion.
Slack 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)
I think it would be silly to not proceed with the migration, although hopefully there's less stress to do it quickly. Slack has shown they can't be trusted.
I’m not sure they could have been trusted at any time, their inventives are not aligned with HackClub’s.
Yes! Only now they don't have to rush it quite as much.
+1 this is my personal opinion, will post an update as a reply to my original comment once the team reaches a consensus
Only because it gained so much attention.
Regardless, 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.
I 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?"
Hike prices for thousands of orgs, revert for the ones that make it to front page of HN. End up with way more money than not hiking prices for anyone
You sound like straight shooter with upper management written all over you.
No way to know for sure, but you are very likely correct
Hack club was offered 5 years of Enterprise+ to make up for the situation, and has decided not to migrate at this time
I have no sympathy for Hack Club if they're caught out by this again and in 6 months Slack decide to revert back to the price increase when all the social media focus has died down.
They didn’t say they wouldn’t migrate docs etc to another solution, if I were them I’d keep it for chat only but with the attitude that if it’s burned at any moment then that’s fine, anything important is backed up or no longer there.
And what will happen after these 5 years?
Now they have 5 years to prepare for transfer instead of days
can you please link to this public announcement
https://reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack_ext...
Oh yeesh. If I ranked chat platforms, Mattermost would barely be above Slack. It's pathetic that Discord runs circles around Mattermost, Slack, and Matrix for practical usability, features that make it possible to actually use with teams (not Teams).
Mattermost still can't do follow System Theme, (and Slack requires you impersonating Chrome). Of course neither can Gmail. Salesforce and Google are such tiny companies though, so I sympathize.
It's craaazy what shit we put up with.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
I think Zulip is missing out on a lot by not having a "complaint" (SOC2-type2, etc) offering. I think Zulip is brilliant.
Discord at least has "forums" for forced threaded discussions, and the in-room threaded conversations work far better than Slack or Matrix's.
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...
[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).
I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.
Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.
Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms
I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden
Funny. Using Discord through Firefox I can't even copy links out of a conversation. Additionally, for some reason as of two weeks ago every time I click on a channel name it opens in a new tab. I'm not sure what that's running circles around, but I'm guessing not Mattermost.
The mobile app is also buggy as hell. Notifications of direct messages (when someone wants to reach you personally) work only sporadically whereas in group chats they're reliable. Then when you click one of those group ones, it opens the group chat, flashes you the message, then loads the rest of the history, scrolls you down, and marks the whole chat as read. I've eventually found that you can find it again by going out of the chat and to your in-app notifications and tapping it there again. Then iirc to reply, you need to click some "open in chat" option (while you're already literally viewing the chat) and then it seems to scroll and show you the message correctly. Or maybe that latter thing was from search results, idk
I'm also pretty sure it silently deletes old direct message chats. I'm missing some that I really thought existed. Don't fault them for deleting things btw, seeing all the (literal and figurative) shit that thousands of teenagers post in this server I was helping out on, but it shouldn't be silent
I’m more disgusted by the alleged humans at Slack when they inevitably reverse their decision like this and choose to lie about being incompetent over admitting to being malicious.
Slack 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...
OpenStreetMap Slack https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ was forced to downgraded to the free edition earlier this year for similar reasons.
Join us on Signal or one of the many other options: 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
Funny, 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
Best 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/p17500871180...
Here is the public announcement: 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.
> if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
Is the concept of "full price" well-defined in this kind of situation?
I assumed price was always a matter of negotiation for enterprise-y sales. I'd think a "full price" would just be an attempt at anchoring by the vendor.
That'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.
Second-hand anecdote: Someone I know who works for Slack made a comment a few years ago that the company regretted giving out so many free instances to different organizations years back. Apparently the number of free Slack instances that had grown very large and high traffic was significant enough that it couldn’t be completely ignored.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.
Maybe, but theres a real benefit to getting your tool in the hands of ambitious kids if you want to sustain a market share once those kids grow older.
There's a reason Apple still gives pretty solid educational discounts even as the largest consumer hardware manufacturer.
It's a chat app. How much traffic can there be? Just hobble the high bandwidth functionalities for non paying instances and be done with it. I find it quite hard to justify the way Slack is behaving.
It's a "chat app" that includes large file uploads, video calls, and whatnot.
Its true but then again, they could provide tiers that restrict large file upload, video calls etc. I think most of the businesses using Slack are unlikely using their video call system (and more likely to use Zoom, Teams, Google Meet). Most organizations use Slack for its organized messaging system; maybe they should make plans that focus on that.
They try to pack more and more features and realize that when their customers start using these, it costs them money.
Yes. I already address that in my post. Block the features the use bandwidth.
Them keeping the _chat logs_ history hidden has nothing to do with bandwidth costs. They store the data, they already pay for that, and it's not that large to begin with. The reason they do this is to hold you hostage so you have to pay them a ton of cash. It's extortion. You can defend it all you want, but they're all pretexts, not the real reason.
Right? The fact that you can’t keep a local copy of the history at all times is seriously telling.
Not quite, even the name is based on "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".
The value for me is in the search, recall, history.
If it was just a chat app I'd much sooner use matrix or IRC.
> search, recall, history.
Search, recall, history... of what more exactly? Of... could it be.. _chat_ logs?
It is essentially, chat logs and shared files. With filters for things like I said it in a thread with person X, on this date, and it had a link etc. That with a quick and easy UI.
I don't think there's anything stopping someone implementing a powerful search like that over IRC logs, or matrix logs or whatever. Just that slack were the ones who did it, and marketed it well so it took off.
Saying that, if I was launching a project or startup I probably would not choose to use slack.
Thanks for doing the math. Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this or (infinitely worse?) the executive who demanded it.
> Imagine being the analyst who was paid to optimize this
It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
Should be enough for the state to take custody of their kids.
That is insane.
What? No? Why?
I'm pretty sure they want to lose all of the non-lucrative customers.
Was not obvious before but these days it is: choosing VC-backed service is very risky.
Slack 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.
Our 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.
Teams 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™.
Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers.
I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...
Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which you'd still recommend them?
I hate microsoft, but I really hate slack.
Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.
I really wonder why Discord didn’t start an enterprise offering called Concord. I’m sure there’s enough kids using it that it would get some traction.
Yeah, Discord not going into competition with Slack or Teams has been an own-goal that I've been baffled by for years. Given that Slack apparently thinks their incredibly subpar offering is worth $200k a year, I can't imagine why Discord wouldn't roll out a "We'll run a standalone instance of Discord with your information siloed and DMs retained for legal purposes, with full Nitro/Boost perks for $ALOTOFMONEY/user" version of their software.
It's quite fortuitous Discord never went down this path you've outlined. "Concord" is now a term synonymous with abject and astounding failure. "Unity" is also taken and fraught with negative associations. "Harmony" might be free.
“Harmony” is a line of programmable remote controls from Logitech.
yep tech is a truly revolutionary industry - it goes in circles. Once you seen the same BS cycle happen a few times it's real hard to not become jaded.
Honestly I have so many issues getting notifications on Slack. Messages go completely missed even when I have the user VIP'd, starred, notifications on, everything. I don't know what else I can do to make sure I get messages, to the point I ask people to reach out on Signal if I don't get back to them on Slack and it's at all urgent.
A 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.
It's very easy to describe for me. Teams is horrible in writing text, editing text, reading text, notifications. I'd rather use IRC than teams for text communication.
Its not even good for sharing meme photos, they always a appear as a link I have to click on, instead of showing the image referenced in the link.
That’s a relatively new and annoying change - if the clipboard has an image and the URL it came from, teams always takes the URL. You have to abuse screenshots now.
It works fine on the mobile app, and I'm guessing it works fine in Windows or people wouldn't be using them. But on MacOs its just a link.
Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.
That 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
You can create chat between any group of people that you want and then rename the chat to have a name, but that’s not a channel and it’s not a team and it doesn’t really have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files in a rudimentary way.
I had a problem where it was not possible to include people from different organisations. Once you have more than one external organisation involved, I have to manage how they join and whether "external" or "guest". This makes it difficult or even impossible to set up the channel/chat with the people you want. This is entirely a Teams limitation.
Slack does not have these artificial barriers. You can invite single channel guests, or add them as full-fledged members. It's simple and logical.
We often use meeting chats for these kinds of channels. Meetings that happened months ago sometimes.
People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
> to Slack from Teams
They're the same thing in terms of billing and data.
One 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.
Totally. 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.
> 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
Not people, just the groups who acquire companies. Users still hate Teams.
I recently had the opportunity to use Teams while working with a startup in legal tech where most customers are on Teams.
Honestly? Better than Slack, IMO, once you get used to how things are laid out.
Yeah, I started somewhere around 6-7 Slack communities. I use exactly zero of them anymore. I still feel guilty for roping multiple communities into the service and helping multiple group of people have somewhere to hang out, only for the rug to get pulled out from under all of us.
Seeing a discord channel for special software recommended on a corporate presentation was definitely a first for me. Happened yesterday.
> they migrated to Teams or Google
Migrated to Google what?
Hey! 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
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
Mattermost also has a tutorial to import your slack messages
https://docs.mattermost.com/administration-guide/onboard/mig...
I 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.
Notably, 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.
Forking 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
From one walled garden to another?
You can self-host it.
Awesome, yes I see it's open source. I was thrown off by other comments talking about "They are starting to tighten the screws"
+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/organizati...
I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.
When 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.
Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.
https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche... and the previous blog post linked from there gives some context as to why we rewrote the Zulip mobile apps from React Native to Flutter.
Our Flutter experience over the last few months since launch has been very positive. Most importantly, development velocity is much faster than it was on React Native.
To what? What is the alternative?
Expo/RN TBH.
Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.
It's just react native tooling
Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.
I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V
Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.
Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.
Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).
Makepad looks really promising
Why?
I liked Zulip a lot until that Flutter rewrite. Maybe it's more accessible now but the new look is not for me. I believe the app navigation is largely unchanged, and still doesn't quite feel right. I love the topic-based model nonetheless.
Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.
What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice anything bad.
It's better these day
Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.
Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.
I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.
I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.
I 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.
Moving 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.
Wow, Slack's customer service is worse than Google's? I've never seen such a harsh burn.
Google's paid Workspace customer service is fine.
All the complaints are around the free tier where customer service doesn't exist.
From 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
> 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.
It'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.
Wow! You still trust them?
Hi! 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.
Not 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-limitatio...
Thankfully Mattermost is AGPLv3, so you can just remove the limit.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was exploring self-hosted Mattermost recently, and completely missed this.
there exists a fork that is basically limitless https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter so if that ever becomes a problem you just swap server binary
A 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.
Looks like the releases are pretty up-to-date: https://packages.framasoft.org/projects/mostlymatter/
Once enough people do that, they'll fix this
Good 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.
Another 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)
Another good lesson here: at the end of the day, these are just websites. Don't lose sleep over it. If it's broken for a couple of days, that's ok.
I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost (integration) in a couple of days.
I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.
welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry
Getting 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.
> Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need.
I disagree; this is the best time to unlearn "companies selling proprietary software are our friends"
Arguably it's a more valuable lesson than any technical lesson: ignoring existing open source projects in favour of proprietary stuff should hurt.
The more it hurts the better the lesson sticks.
Skyfall 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.
No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).
I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.
Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.
> 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
From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.
"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go very sideways.
Change "Skyfall" to "Hack Club". It's a bit confusing who is who!
My bad, I took the org name to be "Skyfall". Just substitue "Hack Club" for any time I mention it!
This is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.
Informed 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.
It wasn’t slack, but I’ve had multiple vendors that I was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8 business days before the renewal was due.
Both times I’ve paid the new price for 1 year and cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next year when we didn’t renew.
In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment on this post).
I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue crash into a wall and then complaining online about it doesn't help anyone.
I get that regardless there were warning signs, but it honestly seems like slack either miscommunicated or flat out lied to them about the ability to address pricing. While in retrospect they should have started preparing to migrate away, it's human nature to assume good intentions and hope that things will work out well.
There's a couple of interpretations here.
1. The sales rep really thought they would be able to retain good pricing for them and it fell through, and at the last minute hackclub was blindsided by their inability to retain the pricing.
2. The sales rep thought that hackclub was likely to jump ship if they had time to plan based on the new pricing, and lied to them about the possibility of retaining pricing. And thought that by doing so they could force at least one year of higher cost.
3. Hack Club is misrepresenting their communications with Slack to drum up public approval.
My guess is that option 1 is the most likely, and the optimism of the sales rep ended up being a net negative, and human nature being what it is, Hack Club thought things would work out, and everyone is already busy so why borrow trouble.
As for complaining online, sadly it seems that bad press is the only lever that most people have as a forcing factor for companies these days. I honestly only had a Twitter account for a long time, just so I could complain about companies in public to get them to do the right thing, so unfortunately complaining online does actually help.
Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?
According to the Slack HQ account on Reddit, the situation has been resolved: 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.
I wonder if anything would have been done if there wasn't a public uproar.
The answer to this is nearly always "No"
> 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.
Yes it does. They don’t have to pay $200k/yr + $50k immediately, and don’t have to spend the time, effort, and money on self-hosting and migrating away.
It solves it for this one client. It doesn’t provide any transparency on exactly how this occurred (like you would for say, a data breach) and provides no guarantees (only words) that this won’t happen again, or any guarantee that this isn’t happening to any other client right at this moment!
“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.
“Oh shit, we’ve been on HN #1 for a day, how do we control the damage”
Classic "I'm sorry we go caught"
Do 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-limitatio...
Seems 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.
How is the user limit enforced? Clearly if the project is FOSS, such an anti-feature can be trivially patched out. Or so you would think...
You can patch it out but you then need to do your own builds for each version and keep on top of the patch. You can no longer just 'update' and you won't be able to patch the compiled version.
Calls plugin has been restricted to only DMs (so no group calls and so on too)
That discussion also mentions: "Framasoft is maintaining a soft fork called Mostlymatter that removes the arbitrary user limits"
Yes, 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.
It also looks like that specific fork hasn't been touched since may 2024 ? https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter -- so realistically they may need to maintain their own fork.
There is newer action on version tags: https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter/-/comm... (10.12 seeming to be the latest mattermost version, so fully up-to-date)
There are plans to fork the repo at some point, since we do depend on lots of custom features eventually regardless (and nearly everything at HC is open source).
There 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_pri...
> the company started as the anti-Oracle.
The company was founded by an Oracle executive...
I mean, when you hire a lawn mower should you be surprised they want to mow lawns.
For the young people who might be reading this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
As a younger person myself, this talk is incredibly entertaining, kind of eye-opening too; the passion for engineering that speaker radiates is immeasurable.
My 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.
S&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.
Mattermost 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.
In what way is it crippling?
(I am not snarky, I don't know much about Mattermost)
Mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287107
This 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.
Imagine how hard must one fuck up to make Teams become the viable alternative.
Did they fuck up? I think they either want a reasonable revenue stream from users or they don’t want the overhead of maintaining those users.
From a Slack perspective, it seems reasonable.
Yes, they fucked up -- not by charging more, but by saying "pay us 10x your annual rate within 1 week or we destroy all your data", with no notice.
Knowing that they would consider treating ANY customer that way means no other customer should use their services.
> "pay us 10x your annual rate within 1 week or we destroy all your data", with no notice
no notice? it is clearly one week notice
How have so many commenters missed this point?
Are they actually treating their bigger customers this way? Anyone with an account manager is probably fine. Anyone that will potentially be a big customer is getting wined and dined when closing deals.
So who is being affected? The lowest tier customers? From their short term perspective I think they’ve just shed all the “low value” customers almost over night.
And I’m sure orgs with enough spend can negotiate a bit.
I’m not saying I would use slack or that they are good. Just that I think they thought about this.
I will never create a new slack workspace unless forced to. Unless this non-profit is costing them more than what they were paying, I doubt this move made any business sense. And if it cost them more than 5000$ a year to support these users, there's either more to the story or Slack as a company has been heavily overvalued.
Because microsoft would never do such a thing
So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!
At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.
With 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).
Millions 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.
> 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.
Not overnight but I remember sql server licensing having a huge increase when they decided to pursue rent seeking via azure.
And even then (let's say 2008), if you purchased the most expensive license (Enterprise processor license) and paid for all sockets (it was calculated per socket, not per core) you could run as many SQL Server instances with as many users as you wanted on that server, in however many VMs you needed. No subscription, permanent license. You might have to purchase support extensions if you wanted ability to call MS for issues, but that's separate thing and you can ignore it if you don't need it.
That was until someone decided to start strong arming people with dissenting opinions via compromised companies.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...
I 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.
The two last companies I worked for have switched from Slack to Teams. I just assumed that they had some package deal for Microsoft Office that included Teams anyway.
These have been quite big developer heavy companies. If companies like these don't think they can motivate the cost for Slack, I wonder if there are any than can.
O365 pretty much always includes a Teams license, so if you're paying for O365 anyway...
Not any more due to the EU antitrust case ironically brought by Slack.
True, at least in Sweden the Basic subscription with Teams is 66 SEK vs without which is 54 SEK. So that's ~12 SEK, while a Slack Pro user is about 90 SEK.
they tend to be smarter about this. Instead of a rug pull, they apply the boiling frog principle. Much more gradual and opaque in their increases. It all adds up of course
I mean we all know Microsoft and their reputation, but they not exactly known for rising price x40 for non-profits.
Usually Microsoft was opposite: giving a lot of software for education for cheap or free to vendor lock-in people into their stack.
NOT advocating for using Teams because God please no, but Microsoft reliability us much better than Salesforce.
I 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?
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
Yeah, like, it's weird to wish for more details, because I'm sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it'd probably be in the post!
I find this absolutely ridiculous and I question how this can even be legal. Surely a contract cannot be unilaterally changed on such short notice?
Imagine your landlord increased the rent by 4000% and it's due in 5 days or you're out on the street.
Sure, they have the right to increase their prices, but there should be at least a month notice for something like this.
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment?
Are 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.
Exactly what you’d expect from a sales department at risk of missing their arr target this quarter.
Almost 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.
What 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.
We'll let you know how we like Mattermost once we've had a chance to actually use it :')
My teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst case we're reading directly from the PG database.
We are using a hosted Zulip instance for company chats at Kagi, not just to prevent scenarios like this but also for data privacy reasons.
Based 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.
Thanks ChatGPT
Slack 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.
We'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.
If 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..
This is licensing problem, not hosting problem. VMware and Oracle didn't got it reputation out of thin air.
You 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.
Self 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.
Again, servers still run while you negotiate.
You seem to forget that there was an agreement about price that slack did not respect.
When this happens in a normal world, you get lawyers and a court involved.
Where’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.
Hi, 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.
>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.
I 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.
Cory Doctorow has called this "enshittification" and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.
I 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.
Agreed, it's bizarre. $5,000/yr > $0/yr. There's no way the operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000/yr.
Because the calculation is that if:
N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K
Then its a profitable operation for slack.
Maybe 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
It'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.
They'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.
Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.
Slack just did the same to us for our company Slack. We have to have the HIPAA compliant Enterprise version, price going up 40% next year. Looks like we'll migrate, especially because compliance has a bunch of annoying caveats.
We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.
The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".
Ohh woooow, they at least gave us like 9 months (until our next contract renewal).
Right now the plan is to move to Google Chat (already a Google shop) and an internally build chat in our EHR for some of the patient-focused things.
Yeah they fucked Heroku hard. I used to love Heroku. Can’t imagine there’s many people still left using it now.
> Yeah they fucked Heroku hard
Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable
in fact, if you actually look at the historical timeline, many of the things we think of as core to developer experience only were released after salesforce acquisition.
I think even multiple buildpacks at once only came a couple years after acquisition.
Possibly they were in the pipeline before acquisition, sure.
But I'd agree, heroku is still a better DX than almost any competitors, although it's features and pricing have really stagnated. So better DX as long as you don't need any features it doens't have. But it hasn't really been 'ruined' in any way, it just started appearing frozen in amber some years ago.
The new 'fir' platform is promissing, before that I didn't really know that any actual development was taking place in heroku, but it's a big move, modernizing things and setting the stage for more. Including slightly improved resource-to-pricing options. We'll see if it all works out...
Hundreds of thousands, in fact. But I bet it’s a downward trend with no hope of a turnaround.
We just managed to shut down our last Heroku service a week ago. Good riddance.
what did you migrate to?
We got rid of all Rails apps (that needed a backend). We've moved our Postgres databases to Neon, and run our docker containers on Google Cloud Run (these are containers that don't need to run 24/7, we're paying just a few cents each month, also cold starts are much faster and more reliable than on Heroku).
Not OP, but we originally migrated to Digital Ocean. But now, all complex stuff is on AWS and dual-stack stuff is on Replit.
and 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
>> and what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting env vars to replicate the heroku features?
Yes Digital Ocean did all this, they were very feature-close to Heroku. We have over time migrated everything stable/prod to AWS just because AWS has more products and hence you have everything in one place inside a VPC (e.g. vector db)
For Replit, i'd use it for anything I can in early-stages. It helps to prototype ideas you are testing. You can iterate rapidly. For PROD we'd centralize onto AWS given the ecosystem.
cheers, I really appreciate your answers
and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you use something like elasticbean or app runner? or did you roll your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
> and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you use something like elasticbean or app runner? or did you roll your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
We started with Lambdas because you can split work across people and keep dependencies to a minimum. Once your team gels and your product stabilizes, it is helpful to Dockerize it and go ECS, that is what we did. Some teams in the past used EKS but IMHO it required too much knowledge for the team to maintain, hence we've stuck with ECS.
All CI/CD via Github --> ECS. This is a very standard pipeline and works well locally for development also. ECS does the scaling quite well, and provides a natural path to EKS when you need the scale bigtime.
For logging, if I could choose I'd go Datadog but often you go with whatever the budget solution is.
I still have old personal projects on there
Its inertia, its just not a priority to move them over
We'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?
I get the sense that Mattermost is the same kind of eventually-get-you-paying play as Slack.
Other threads are mentioning Zulip, which feels more old-school free as well as Free open source.
We're self-hosting Mattermost, it's open core!
We should stop letting ourselves get suckered into these proprietary systems. Same with Discord. It may look great now, but there's still a company behind it looking to extract as much profit from it as possible, and eventually it will get enshittified. We know this. We've seen it happen dozens of times. We really should stop falling for it.
Open standards, easy migration, and servers you pay an honest cost for. Self-hosting, perhaps even. That's where we need to go.
https://matrix.org/
I 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.
I'd say Teams is NOT a chat tool. You can find on the web many pieces of critique towards Teams as a chat tool and most of them have a lot of merit to them.
Teams is good at what it does and serves its niche well, however unless your daily matters are not well aligned with the particular framework Teams is designed for expect significant friction. It's not really the team size that matters, but rather how you structure your daily work.
A lot of the power of teams comes from integration with Active Directory, Sharepoint and Office. Sharing a presentation in a meeting that viewers can browse (e.g. to check back on something in a previous slide), calendar syncing with scheduling assistant, meetings scheduled in a team, meeting recordings and recaps, linking directly to a single page in OneNote, etc. are all quite powerful features, but most of the power is relevant if your organizational matters are structured more or less as a traditional enterprise and around AD/Office.
Inviting third parties or contractors can be quite a pain, especially if chat history is relevant. Meetings having their own chat can create information searchability issues. Integrating with third party tools is less straightforward and consequentially ecosystem of integrations is a bit of wasteland.
I use Element in an organisation of around 300 people, most of which are non technical. 98 % of them really dislike Element and I really understand why. Even for the most technical people it just does not work reliably like WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage, which are some apps those people use privately. I really hoped that it'll all get better with Element X, both on Android and iOS, but it's not. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone really.
This would make sense if you were talking about the old Element app, but Element X is generally seen as a night and day improvement. Can you say what the problems are on Element X?
Trying to speak dispassionately as someone who lives their life in Element X iOS, I find it is way more reliable than WhatsApp (where I get way more “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t E2EE.
I am not disputing the lived experience on your side, but something big must be different. Is the server underpowered or misconfigured or something? Or is it using a beta server like Dendrite?
I don't know about the server being underpowered or misconfigured.
I compared it with those Messengers because that's what we as users are used to. I know that TG is not E2EE and therefore not comparable on a technical level, but that's still what users of Element are used to.
I personally use iMessage the most as my Messanger and in the last >10 years I never had any problems with a message not being able to be decrypted. And iMessage not being as featureful as Element is not an excuse for having more bugs especially in key areas of the service. Again, iMessage being just an emxample.
A reasonably long message, but you didn't actually give any specifics on what bugs you encountered.
You implied an "unable to decrypt", but this should be fixed in Matrix 2.0 and Element X. If you encounter a UTD now, you must capture it and let Arathorn know.
Night and day improvement is relative. For example, last time I tried the iOS version had no localization to some languages, which the old one has, and not everyone can deal with an interface falling back to English.
While I agree with you. Element is tooo heavy! I know there is Element X, but it has a lot issues working with others who has different clients. I would rather not use element if possible. There is a lighter weight Hydrogen seems more pleasing on code and front end.
https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login
So on the up side about matrix is if you don't like you can roll your own.
(unfortunately Hydrogen is no longer being developed; nobody funded it. Instead, focus is on Aurora, aka Element X Web: https://element.io/blog/hacking-for-a-sovereign-digital-euro... etc)
Yikes!!! One question got for matrix people?
Why is there NOT a version that works in the mobile browser?
Is it because the key management the whole indexDB gets deleted on Safari?
Can we just have matrix-js-sdk working in lowest possible mobile browser for public rooms and unencrypted messages?
hydrogen (hydrogen.element.io) was built for mobile web. but all our effort goes into native mobile apps these days.
Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.
I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.
And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.
And so on.
We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).
I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
> I tried running a community on it and it was a colossal failure.
I'm sorry to hear that. When was this? We have been making a huge effort to fix problems like these over the last 1-2 years (albeit focusing on workplace comms rather than discord-style comms, but the hope is that discord-style comms will follow).
> The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts
It sucked for sure on the legacy apps, but I think we fixed it on Element X.
Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.
> there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server
Assuming we're talking about the same thing, the canonical identity server is http://github.com/element-hq/sydent (formerly http://github.com/matrix-org/sydent).
> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.
Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it working, not even with matrix's identity URL.
We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite capable it seemed to me.
This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to find, I think sydent may not have been as officially "canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up? It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have time to resolve after taking a crack at it.
I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x however we recommended our members not to use the element x app since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!
I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for it one day when discord enshittifies.
we stopped offering identity server a long time ago because of the privacy concerns the whole concept raised and the fact the only non-Sydent option at that time was basically abandoned (ma1sd). The situation was basically 2 bad decisions: either lock in with Sydent or don't use an identity server at all.
Considering the low interest in the identity server functionality and the amount of concerns around the concept, we took the latter bad decision - that way we don't offer a self-hosted identity server but don't limit customers in using the matrix.org's one (even with their own Matrix server). That seems like an acceptable trade off. After all, even Sydent's README contains the following:
> Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver? > > Short answer: no. > > Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity server whatsoever.
PS: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers
I'd been working for 4 years with slack, and now for 5 months with teams. Slack was easier searchable, thread organisation is much better. In teams there are two types of communication - one is chat which has no threads (just answer to message as in WhatsApp), and channels which has forum vibe (more like post board).
Calls are better in teams, much better to be precise than slack. We rarely used slack for calls (it had nice feature of drawing on colleague's screen) which I think is also available in teams.
I think that integration is crippled in teams but I didn't have time to experiment with it.
So overall I'd suggest: go for teams if you want to call meetings and are not using slack as a main knowledge base, as we used to in my previous company. Especially considering matters highlighted in this article
If you're bought into the windows ecosystem its great for shared docs and fine for calls. Terrible as a messenger service
Strongly 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.
> Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed.
That's a feature not a bug.
Chats are for quick collaboration on documents. You share it, you get immediate collaborative editing, you do what you have to do and then you eventually archive the document somewhere it makes sense to archive it which in MS Teams would be a Team.
I really like the break down between Team which persists and chat for one off things but I know it really throws off some people.
For docs, there is cryptpad.fr
Campfire is solid: https://once.com/campfire
Yes, the sad thing is both teams and google whatever-they-call-the-chat suck for text based developer communication.
Threads? No pinning... no collapsible text snippets... no nothing.
No channels either.
Self hosted Matrix maybe? I remember i was on a project that was automatically mirroring the slack to a Matrix thing. Not sure how good the clients are though.
Teams added threads in chat channels (I don’t know if it’s only new channels or what, check settings) but it’s horribly confusing to some and they can’t figure out how to look at a thread.
But it’s there. I’ll give that the Microsoft, they start out incredibly crappy and do keep iterating until it’s somewhat usable.
Very shameless promotion but if you really enjoy threaded chat we're building https://cushion.so which keeps everything threaded by default.
You can create DM groups with yourselves if you like private chats in groups also.
For 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
It'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...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
Oh, they know, that's why they have banned all other AI from interacting with Slack.
The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll generate some ARR short term but ultimately people will be looking elsewhere, new companies will start on alternatives and others switch when the opportunity arises. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.
Salesforce 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.
I know a few engineers in different companies within Salesforce. They're under lots of pressure to integrate AI everywhere, and leverage it. The way they've talked about it gives me strong "flailing around desperately" vibes, when the smarter money is on making more minimal but targeted efforts, or at least waiting to see what happens the other side of the bubble.
I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?
Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.
Has any company got this feature? Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds good in theory but is hard to actually pull off. To complete this query you'd have to process almost the entirety of the chat history in every channel. Which sounds extremely expensive, and we know LLMs start to go off the rails when you give them too much context.
Because implementing _useful_ AI features is hard.
What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack needs to do to enable this feature?
Useful summarization of long dialogues is harder than it looks.
What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack needs to do to enable this feature?
Slack does have this. Basic AI summaries are included in all paid plans, and AI search and other features are part of the $20/mo plan.
Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.
Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.
I 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.
It'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.
As 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
I’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.
You could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage chat for just this amount of money
Or an infra engineer willing to volunteer and teach the teens and adult members how to set up and maintain the self-hosted chat.
Seems 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.
Since no one has mentioned in the thread yet: Slackdump is a great way to dump Slack: https://github.com/rusq/slackdump. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?
Yes, 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!)
Sorry, 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.
This 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.
Or didn't do due diligence on "PR impact of the next extortion target".
I 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.
> 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.
Don't need a decade, I rarely if ever see Teams not malfunctioning daily...
Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
It'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)
This 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
Didn't realize Glue was still around! Will take another look.
You're overlooking a lot of the utility of DMs for things like "Hey dude, want to grab some lunch at 12:30?"
Found the manager.
I would go mental without DMs
I am a founder of one company and work in sales. Here's where I'm coming from:
As a founder, if everyone is always DMing you, the knowledge is not shared with the team. You become the bottleneck for everything.
In sales, you end up having the #account-[customer] thread and about 4 or 5 DM groups with different internal people on them for each account. Lots of time bringing everyone up to speed when it could be more unified.
Sure, there are sensitive issues like employee conflict, salary discussions, etc. I'm not saying everything needs to be in the public. But I think DMs as they work in Slack cause more issues than they solve.
>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.
If 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.
That 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.
Lots 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://flarum.org/
https://www.simplemachines.org/
Something 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/...
Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.
I 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.
If you want help, I'm more than willing.
I recently wrote some kubernetes charts for running Zulip for my new (smol) org, but I've ran Zulip for the last 3 years as CTO for a mid-sized AAA video game development company...
I really would recommend it over Mattermost (which was in use at another development company I was briefly a part of)
It's well documented and very easy to follow, just need to run a few Ansible scripts
Would love to use Zulip, but the bad mobile app reviews are scaring me off.
I 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).
At 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.
We 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.
The Zulip app is just fine, at least on Android.
Can you elaborate on "threaded nature"? Mattermost has threads...
Our 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.
> 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.
Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...
Just 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.
With file hosting. Which can occupy a lot of storage, but yeah, pricing is still insane.
For 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
I 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.
It 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.
The responses you're getting perfectly encapsulate the problem.
I'm not knocking the people trying to be helpful, but "<x> client sucks, use <y> client instead" is a huge UX problem in and of itself.
I have used Matrix daily for several years now, however I don't ever use voice or video on it, just text chats and image uploads. Regarding the Element Android issue, you might need to install ntfy. The only Matrix client I've used with unreliable notifications is FluffyChat. I think both Element and Element X are working fine for me.
I recommend Matrix, and it works well for me. I'm using Element (old) on Android though, not Element X.
Around 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.
Are 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.)
I grow tired of your chronic replies to everyone critical of Matrix implying that they’re holding it wrong.
If everyone using your software has trouble using your software (or tracking the bugfixes supposedly resolved in the never ending rewrites, rebrands, etc), maybe you should stop pushing it until it’s ready.
Every experience I have had with using Matrix has been a bad one: with the old client app, with the new client app, with the web app, trying to run the server, etc. It’s clunky and slow when it does work. It phones home to the Vector servers by default, despite being selfhosted. It’s a pain in the ass for end users to point it at a different hosted instance.
Maybe the answer is just “the whole thing, client, server, protocol - it’s all still in beta and you shouldn’t expect it to work well”. If that’s the answer, I wish people would stop recommending it until such time it works well.
I'm not implying they're holding it wrong - i'm explaining that we're finishing a migration from one VoIP stack to another, and the new tech is still beta, hence asking which one they're using. If you're going to try to flame my replies, please at least read them.
I was using element X. I can re-install the stack and see if things have improved. If you want someone to debug with I'll gladly hop on a call to see if I'm doing something wrong. The jist of my setup was postgres, coturn, element web and synapse with traefik in front of it exposed to the web in a docker compose
Maybe 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://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.
It'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.
And archiving apps not allowed in the marketplace… very aggressive move to destroy free and non enterprise tier
I'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?
Slack 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
> 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-imp...
EU Data Act will be more relevant here, but will take a while to roll out.
It 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.
what kind of joke is this...
Unpopular 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.
Not unpopular at all. That’s the way
I 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.
So many stories like this about Slack.
We use Zulip (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.
I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!
Unless 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
It'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/
Oh, so I was missing something!
That was not very obvious from their landing page!
Well in that case, carry on!
> That was not very obvious from their landing page!
It says in bold letters:
"Your data is yours!
For ultimate control and compliance, self-host Zulip’s 100% open-source software"
Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site. In this case they apparently meant it, but to me that just registers as marketing speech.
I guess I've been on the internet too long, my brain automatically blacks certain language out, like a biological spam filter.
> Well yeah but I bet slack has similar wording on their site.
...You could go to the Slack website right now and see? We're on the internet. It's all on the internet. We can literally just check.
Doesn't seem to mention anything about being open source, anything privacy-related, data, or hosting.
Sadly as with many such products, if you want SSO and the like, you'll still end up paying per user per month. That gets stupid expensive quick
Or not.
> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our Zulip Cloud customers.
> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions. There is no “open core” catch — just freely available world-class software.
The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on self-hosted Zulip.
That's exciting! I didn't catch that from the pricing page, thank you for clarifying :)
go to product > self-hosting
you might notice it's 100% free software
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
See: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...
It is open source and you can self host it.
“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.
Indeed, I have seen Ransomware threats with 3 to 4 weeks timelines.
A 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.
VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.
No. Also VMWare moved perpetual licenses to subscriptions, not the other way around.
Proton did this without warning with their upgrade coupons back in day. Still salty.
Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element https://element.io/, I don't know why more people don't do this.
I personally would’ve gone for matrix since it’s free and open source, but I’m sure this license will be better..
That 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?
We 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.
I 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.
Note 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.
Mattermost 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.
Wrong. 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.
Mattermost 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.
I 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.
I 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
You're finding it "hard to side" with a literal nonprofit charity getting bullied ruthlessly because something something SaaS not self-managed? My God, dude.
This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.
I have always found the argument of "They deserve this because they should know better" to be a very bizarre way of thinking.
It implies there is only one correct way to think or to prioritize or to approach a problem. It also (pointlessly) tries to shame someone for something that has already happened and cannot be reversed.
I would find it hard to side with Jesus Christ himself if he decided to start teaching via Discord server.
I 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).
I feel like communities have very good reasons to at least consider the option where the most users (since this nonprofit focuses on teens) are already using
What does a dude from centuries ago have to do with all this?
It's reductio ad absurdum with a twist, and that dude is the typical shoe-in for hyperbolic examples that need a moral paragon.
The number two focus of a charity should be good financial management. First being the charity's mission. I would not support even a large charity to pay $200k/yr for a chat server.
This 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.
Honestly, 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.
From Larry Ellison his playbook; Benioff copied his former teacher well.
This 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.
I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: 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.
It'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/ 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.)
Sounds like a great project! Sorry you had to deal with this headache.
I'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).
Hi, 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.
It'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...
That’s salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.
Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?
Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...
So 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
The 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
It 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).
Hack 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
Why did they switch? Given the information provided, it seems that paying anything, if you're on a grandfathered free plan, is a bad deal.
Slack moved us off the free plan to the 5k plan, which is fair considering thousands of users; it costs money to host those servers.
There 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.
Right - 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.
i 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.
Right. The sensible thing to do would have been to develop a migration strategy as soon as you hear words like "grandfathered" or "first-year discount".
I 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/
Well, 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.
If 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.
If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...
Set it up earlier than late, if you're expecting 7 days notice before deletion
Frankly, 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?
That 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.
I'd get off ASAP.
As 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.
The 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.
The 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.
New projects in that genre keep popping up, for example eIRC: An Enterprise Chat System Based on IRC https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
Slack responded on twitter: https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173
we 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.
As 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.
We 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.
Let's revisit this assessment in a few years.
we'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.
I'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.
If 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.
Integrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and provide an off ramp in the meantime
0: https://www.linen.dev/
Slack 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.
Out 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?
Consider building your own (many large communities do). 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.)
There is also IRC, which has web frontends like KiwiRC.
We 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.
The bad actors are pretty well known:
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- SalesForce
- Broadcom
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.
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.
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.
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
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.
Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.
A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...
Rate limits are bad (2/min for channel history). We've explicitly been told not to scrape API, since admins are working on exporting the data into Mattermost.
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.
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.
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
"Eventually" often means 30 years later. Computer Associates was a pure customer abuse house for 20 years; many Oracle products have been that way for 35 years.
Enterprise software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is as a rule abysmal. My model of how this happens is that there are large barriers to entry, and actually working well is not one of them, because the guy signing the PO doesn't have visibility into whether they work well or not. I don't know what the barriers are, but I suspect they include hiring people who already know CTOs, bribing ignorant shills like the Gartner Group, and having a convincing appear you'll still be in business in 10 years.
This is pretty sad. It sounds like emotion-driven FOMO than reason-driven decision-making. Or maybe CYA-driven decision-making ("migrated infrastructure to AWS", nobody ever was fired for buying AWS!).
I would very much understand it if the reasons given were like "We miss the following capabilities that our competitors have: ...", or "We have trouble interoperating with key partners", etc. These would be actually good reasons to pay more, and risk more.
Yeah that’s what I thought I said - that sometimes it’s legitimate need, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s...complicated.
I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to software - there are people who redo their kitchens every year because they can and people who are doing it for the first time in 30 years - it’s just what it is
"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.
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.
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.
No support, poor integration with local file systems, their office is pretty basic. Plus it's Google, I personally trust it less than Microsoft. I still need Teams for calls with external partners, and I need proper Excel.
The problem with Google is that it is impossible to ever talk to anyone when you need support.
I was adding a calendar event on Teams (or was it "JS"-Outlook). I wanted to copy from another area in the app, but since it was a modal dialog, I couldn't. There's a button to pop up the "add event" dialog to be its own window. I clicked it, the add event window is now detached. But if course all the stuff I previously entered disappeared, what did I expect, that someone would bother to add code to prevent them from disappearing!?!
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.
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.
good thing that Hack Club has a LOT of smart and talented people + using FOSS software makes it easy to fix stuff!
Seriously, 40 bucks a month gets you a great server at Hetzner then you can have mattermost there and many other office utilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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"
Yeah, that’s fair. It is reasonable to expect companies to not be complete jerks.
Shout out to those who give their time to open-source free to use projects. You make the internet a more tolerable place.
We 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.
I suspect that the same applies to discord.
Do not use Slack.
A 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.
I 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.
https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack
Slack 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.
this 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
Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing.
Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
>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.
Personally, 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>
Convenience is king, and unfortunately Matrix is not very convenient. Way too cumbersome to get going from a user perspective.
"[..] 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!
Maybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and landed at: https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/
…Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
Last 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.
The cloud is other people's computers.
Rented apartments are just someone else's house.
These things being true does not negate the standard practice of respectful contract negotiation.
True. And I don't want to stretch the analogy too far, but it's harder to evict someone from a house they own.
For 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?
Can 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?
No first hand experience, but 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.
saas 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.
First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
Yea. The reply feature in Discord is way better and their introduction of "threads" makes everything worse.
What happens in Mattermost if you open up a thread and send a message in it without replying to a message? Does it still show up outside of the thread? I can see how that might be confusing.
If you make the reply in the thread it will go in the thread. Threads in Mattermost are single-tiered (you can't do sub-threads). So they're somewhat limited, and sure, people will occasionally respond to thread conversations out-of-thread. That's a user issue more than anything else. They're not perfect, but they are very useful.
Hmm, I don't remember it like that. Isn't that exactly how Discord and Slack does it?
I've never used Mattermost, so I'm only going off my reading of what you said, but the difference is that, if you're not actually in a thread when you reply to a message on Discord, it doesn't get put into that thread, whereas on Mattermost, IIUC, you're saying that you can reply to a message outside of a thread and be able to click into a thread made of all those replies.
My question (and pcthrowaway's) response is about what happens when you send a message inside a thread without replying to a message. I was wondering if it would be sent into the main channel, with no context, which would be confusing.
It sounds like you're under the impression that threads can only be started by "replying to a message". That's true in the sense that threads are created when you hit the reply icon to a top-level message, and type a response in the section for the thread starting with that message.
Afterwards, all responses sent in the thread are part of that thread. By default, on versions of Mattermost in the last year, these are visually separated from the channel, almost like a sub-channel that you can reply in. In the web app, the thread is off to the side of the main channel.
Responses in the thread do not show up on the channel; the top-level messages which have replies in-thread say the number of messages in that thread, which you can click on to open the thread. Messages sent to the main channel go to the main channel, but in the thread view, you're not necessarily replying to any one specific message, just posting a message in the thread.
I think there are other ways to view this though, so based on user settings it may also be possible to see threaded responses in the main channel (I haven't experimented with the alternate view settings though)
Not sure if that answers your question, but you can always join the mattermost official server and try it out yourself if you're curious: https://community.mattermost.com/
> It sounds like you're under the impression that threads can only be started by "replying to a message". That's true in the sense that threads are created when you hit the reply icon to a top-level message, and type a response in the section for the thread starting with that message.
No, I'm just focusing on reply-chains and their interactions with threads because the former often leads to the latter, and I misunderstood the original comment.
This clarifies things though and is indeed exactly how Discord does it. I just wish there was a better way of handling threads - it seems to me that it's too easy for a conversation to be shoved into a thread and then be forgotten if you're not actively looking for it. That's fine in some cases, like work discussions, but not for say a social community.
Thanks for the responses!
I'm baffled by your suggestion that this is how discord does it, because I have used discord for a while and never seen threads (I use the web app and not the mobile app though). Am I missing something like this?
In Discord you can certainly reply to messages, but that basically just references them. Messages all appear top-level in their channels. There is no "side chat" that will contain the threaded conversations.
Again, unless I'm missing something due to using the web app and maybe having threads disabled in my settings.
Mattermost is very different in how it handles this. I haven't used Slack in a while, but IIRC it's much more similar to slack
This has grown into a longer series of misunderstandings than seems necessary. :P
Yes, Discord's behavior with regards to the initial creation of threads is not the same, if I understand you right. To create a thread, one has to explicitly click a New Thread button, OR Discord will prompt you after 2-3 replies in a row to create a thread for that message chain. After that, the thread will show up under the top-level channel, and you can open it up in a sidebar. *
What I meant when I said this is how Discord does it was with regards to how messages are shared - or not, as it is - between the top-level channel and the thread. As I said, I misunderstood earlier comments regarding how this works on other platforms. I really ought to just download Mattermost and check it out :P
* If you're not just talking about specific thread behavior, and indeed have never seen threads at all, you're not alone. They're not very commonly used on Discord, probably because it's not easy to discover them. They're also a relatively new feature.
I believe Discord servers can disable "threads", which maybe what you've seen.
If you right click on a message you can choose "create thread" and it will do this thing (which I personally hate). You can do this on the official Python server for example.
> By default, on versions of Mattermost in the last year, these are visually separated from the channel, almost like a sub-channel that you can reply in. In the web app, the thread is off to the side of the main channel.
Oh dear. It sounds like they made it like slack/discord which I hate.
From what I remember then it works exactly like if you pressed reply to the last message and sent it.
Yeah that makes sense. Still loads better than the way Discord does it currently.
We 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
So 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
You 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.
I missed that part in the article, but yeah - self-host or nothing. We are self-hosting as well, although our group is not a large one.
And the self hosted is, effectively, just `docker up`. Saved us $1000s
We used Mattermost but eventually started getting annoyed by the nags to upgrade in the free version. Zulip is has been far better.
It 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.
Anything you can self-host is mostly safe, because at the very least you have access to the raw data and can move elsewhere if you need to.
It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe Zulip is better?
Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.
Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min ago)
Off topic, but this reminds me of apples worst UI sin in my book: holding the refresh circle bo longer dumps the cache foe the page.
That'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.
sad 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!"
Thank goodness we have a hundred improved protocol alternatives now. Matrix, Tox, Jami, Briar.
I'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?
Hack club member and volunteer here, we are selfhosting a fork of mattermost on our own infra
You can self host for free. You lose some features, but overall it’s still pretty good.
Wow, 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?
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
IMHO "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.
Yes. 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.
>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
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.
I miss the old Internet.
And get off my lawn!
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
Plenty of communities kept IRC archives.
Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.
I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
>I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug.
Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over.
I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win.
To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.
Makes some sense to me.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across the world.
As such, you need to be able to review the legal status of every pairing or group of people's private chats.
At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.
> Organizations aren't limited to a single country. My current client has employees in most of, if not every, time zone across the world.
In a single legal entity?
> At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.
What case law are you considering when you insinuate that Slack must review the retention of records between users of a Slack business customer?
The EU user's messages are governed by the GDPR, regardless of jurisdiction, surely?
Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
Nice! I’d say most of the knowledge can be preserved that way then.
(But I would also start making backups regularly, because who knows if how long this would last)
Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.
> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements
clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery
The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.
Adding on to this, a lot of people don't want their personal chats deleted either!
I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
We use Slack extensively and I'm searching for info in conversations from months or even years ago regularly.
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
I 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.
I use pikapods to cheaply host a couple Open Source apps. They support Mattermost: https://www.pikapods.com/apps
"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.
> 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
I 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.
Monopoly 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.
If others find themselves in a similar situation you could look at https://once.com/campfire
> 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.
I 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?
[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.
Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?
yep! Hard, but possible.
Campfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.
Question 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.
It's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is high enough
A hard lesson in enterprise software is that customers hate surprises on their bill. Don't price in a way that can happen.
Man, 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.
They're serving notice. Data in vendor custody belongs to the vendor, not to the customer. Customers can go to court to prove otherwise.
I 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.
There'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 :(.
matrix 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.
Ok, 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.
PSA: 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.
IRC 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.
Not 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/ 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 and https://convos.chat/doc/features#video-support
Please frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues" with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".
Can 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.
Slack 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.
I 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.
What "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.
You would be surprised how many companies use bookmarked Slack posts as their wiki!
> so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.
Weirdly this part never actually happens.
my 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.
I mean, yeah, but frankly the link to a source is a big step up from someplaces. Its a culture thing.
There are a few rare folks that love writing wiki pages, the catch is getting one on the team.
One isn’t enough (ask me how I know) unless they are involved in everything.
We 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.
Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?
I considered championing transitioning my workplace to Slack as the disdain for Teams keeps growing. Nevermind.
I am building basecase.ai to finally replace slack in 2025. Would love people to try and share their feedback.
Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc
Nothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.
It's OK to end a discount program, but not by threatening to delete everything with 7 days notice.
Let's hope Slack learns from this and fixes their billing procedure at least. Intentional or not.
How does contract law allow this? Is this tactic a common pattern for VC funded or acquired companies?
>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.
What details? Are you privy to them? If so, please share.
Reading 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.
You seem to think you know details the people involved do not and have an axe to grind against them.
No - 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.
It’s very clear when you don’t read their comments and then make stuff up. Try not reading between the lines and just read the lines where they say stuff like we were told to ignore the bill as late as Aug 29 and we were sent no new contract or price change notices.
Sounds like a replacement for slack is needed
Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.
Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?
I stopped being a fan of slack long ago. Such better and free alternatives.
We'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.
> 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...
We switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more consistency.
switch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go proprietary again!
Are there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot comprehend.
Important to know how to get out of a service faster than you got into it.
SaaS is a trap. They silo up your business data then hold it hostage.
This when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible software !
This is remarkably familiar.
well thanks Slack ! now I know about Zulip ! which looks quite nice
cheers to all
Move to Zulip already...
Anyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option
$200k for chat is insane. Even $5k for chat is insane
Wonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.
Please consider IRC or something open protocol instead.
Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.
I'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.
> 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.
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
In the article, this isn't a business. It's a nonprofit.
For 99.9% of nonprofits, their annual budgets are in the single digit thousands or less. A sudden $250k bill is fatal.
A nonprofit is also a business. This particular one makes $11M+ a year in revenue, so in the 0.01%.
Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn't achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!
It'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).
I'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.
Everything 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
The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You can call it distortion if you want.
I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.
Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.
> 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.
In other words a billionaire has a distorted perception of money. Also, water is wet.
To someone in Nigeria on 50usd per month, 1usd is a lot. To a guy earning 10k per month in California, 1 usd is nothing. Who’s distorted here? 50usd or 10k guy?
Everything is relative.
Not distorted. It’s a billionaire perspective, but it’s very real and 100% true to the billionaire. Look up the concept of marginal utility of money.
This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.
Even $50,000/yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind to just stave them off for a week.
I agree, my point was that you and the author of the post seem to be in agreement. I don’t think they’re being flippant about the amount.
You 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.
Slack 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.
Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!
The chickens have come home to roost.
never seen 3265 points for HN post the product seems so bad
i wish discord worked better for work
I wish it worked worse and people stopped used it as a replacement for forums.
Its 2025, people don't want their conversations out on the public internet to be mined and profiled. Discord offers that base privacy.
it has forums now :)
skulk thats only for fun and games sob
great article and I really hope that hack club continues on without slack, and maybe even do better.
Switch to teams. Not that hard.
Gives real Salesforce energy.
Tell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform that the teens and kids already use: Discord.
Not 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.
Just 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.
Maybe Mattermost is solution?
If only they'd written they're moving to Mattermost in TFA.
Edit: oh wait there it is:
"Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost."
What a dick move to do that.
Time to switch to Mattermost.
Did you read the article?
Narrator: they did not.
not only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps
the extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going
At a 2.5% success rate this breaks even
should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server
Just more of the same
No improvement over Slack, just more gaming-focused
It is free, as I understand it, not 200k per year.
It is free, for now.
It already gives kinda creepy "You use this server, why not support it … or else" vibe all over interface.
How about not relying on a third party for your organization...
I guess history repeat.
Slack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force migration.
Hasn’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?
Dumb 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
I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.
they could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.
Welcome 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.
A 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.
No 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 $5 a month, FFS!
Does this really surprise anyone. In the current en$hitification environment? The second saleforce bought slack it was dead to me. I've only got 1 workspace left on it.
Hey, 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.
expensive IRC with history
Nowadays even the history ain't a feature...
Sales force is going the Broadcom route. They only give a shit about megacorps that are basically trapped and anyone else can go fuck themselves.
This 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.
Join us now and share the software. You’ll be free.
Have you tried IRC?
Speaking 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 :)
> 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/.
Anyways, I hope you find a solution.
Make your own Slack?
> 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.
There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
We 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.
Doesn'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.
This 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.
I 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.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You're still free to connect a logging bot.
The sibling comment talks about IRCv3 features that show a limited amount of context from immediately before you joined, which is not the same as the infinite history seen in Slack and Discord.
That's reasonable and personally I hate it when all the helpful details I need are buried in Slack history. But also it's a lot more effort. When someone has an immediate question they need help on, real time chat is an appropriate place to get help.
It takes additional effort and overhead to then go capture the pertinent details that exchange and write them in a wiki. With infinite Slack history you get a janky high noise knowledge base for "free". Huge downsides of course, but clearly it's a very popular approach.
$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.
<nelson>Ha-Ha!</nelson> That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first place....
Slack 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.
I 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?
Not 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.
Yeah 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.
never 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.
I run the desktop app also, but since it's just the electron packaged webapp, I expect no real difference between the two.
Welcome to Microsoft Teams
What 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.
> I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future
Tell that to project maintainers switching from old-school good forums to chat apps such as Discord...
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.
Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.
Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email. I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).
They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the last decade uses it or its equivalent.
It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would exist in this form without Slack-like tools.
I agree that people like Slack. $CRM did pay over 27B USD for it! I just think it's a case of people not knowing what they want.
> They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
Surprisingly, Google for example uses email + real time chat today. All communication of value, meaning thoughtful "actual" exchange of ideas happens over email. Chat is has auto disappear so it's not used for anything which remains on record, it's for small quick asks. There might be a googler in this thread who could give us more insight.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
I hear you on the integrations. There is no shortage of tools which plug into email too though. If the integration doesn't exist, it's typically trivial to set it up since email is just plain text.
> Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
For sure! and it sucks. That is why I promote email heavily for *internal* communications where the community itself enforces rules to keep the mailing list sane. That tends to happen organically in most open source mailing lists.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
There are few tools which are not integrated to email. But I hear you, if you like working in a monolith that makes sense. I like using the best tools for each piece. Best real time chat, best video chat platform, best asynchronous com, best file storage solution etc.
I 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
People 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.
Bring back IRC lol
That’s not what extortion means.
Edit: 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-f...
[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...
Hack 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.
Yes, 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.
it seems your concerns are addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
why has this post been taken off the front page, and why has the title been editorialized?
Yup we agree and have restored the post. The extra background was helpful, plus the community response is clear from the thread and we try never to fight the community.
The title edit is standard practice though - the word "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."). Making titles somewhat more factual/neutral is normal HN moderation. That's not a criticism of the OP, mind you! - we'd feel the same way too in their position.
Oh, please!
> why has the title been editorialized
Indeed, the HN guidelines:
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
By "editorialize" we mean changing a title to introduce spin, or cherry-picking one detail to bias the reader in the direction that the submitter personally wants, rather than reflecting the article as a whole (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136 for a recent comment about that).
In this case, that wasn't at issue. The operative clause is "unless it is misleading or linkbait". A word like "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage. This is nothing personal against the OP! It's actually better for them and for Hack Club if the HN title is relatively neutral while still conveying the critical information.
I work for this foundation, I can guarantee that nothing has changed about our status or Slack's policies. We qualified before and we qualify today, which is why earlier this year when Slack took us off their free plan the rate they negotiated with us was so low. Slack was extremely reasonable during that process and we have no complaints about them.
The thing that changed is that we aren't dealing with Slack anymore, all of a sudden we're dealing with Salesforce. I can only assume they are shaking the money tree at all levels of the organization since their recent disappointing earnings report (I guess they've had a lot of those lately).
I appreciate the nuanced perspective you're bringing here but it really is as scummy as it's written in the post. They are asking us to pay $50k in the next 5 days, just for the privilege of not having our 11 years of history deleted. They don't owe us continued access to their platform on the cheap, but to demand this much money on that kind of time frame? I don't know what to call that other than extortion.
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
unless there is something going on behind the scenes, like an astroturfing signal, this seems like a pretty weak justification for the heavy handed moderation actions taken. it seems at face value like you might have killed an organic front page post attempted by a teenager trying to raise awareness and save his very cool grassroots distributed hackathon charity from an awful lot of unnecessary pain... because there "must be more to the story". i haven't ever seen anything like this on HN.
OK, message received, I've turned off the downweights and we'll keep it on the front page.
The intention wasn't to "kill" the story, but to try and get more details so it would address the questions that came up for me and that I assumed would come up for other readers (which indeed they have [1]). My words "must be more to the story" weren't intended to suggest Salesforce are likely to be in the right, but just that it would be helpful to know. I.e., does this affect all nonprofits/educational organizations? Is this change just targeted at this org? If so why? But I didn't know it was written by a student/teenager, who may not be on top of those details. And given it's late at night and there's such a short timeline for cutoff, we're happy to let the story stay on the front page now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284260
I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.
Over a long enough time frame, this also includes any small company with ambitions to become a large company. Tiny Speck started in 2009 with a $1.5M seed round, before pivoting to Slack, before the $27B Salesforce acquisition.
Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.
It’s not even really just large companies, even though the extortion, predation, and vulture tactics tend to be rolled out once market capture and network effect has been achieved, which tends to correlate with being larger companies.
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
> What makes us so foolish?
High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.
I’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.”
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book _Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book, but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses, and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating their niche with razor focus.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
Thanks for sharing. Two companies come to mind: Strix for kettle controllers and Shimano for bike gears. Maybe they don't fit exactly to the Hidden champions category because they’re not very hidden from the public (many manufacturers mention their names on final products, assuming consumers might take that into account). So the criteria for “hidden champions” could be more flexible imo
Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit fails. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42z87
Yeah, I think there's a lot more "good, focused" companies out there than what are covered in this hidden champions book. The book is just interesting to me. It highlights a lot of the economic export strength of Germany isn't due to the large corporations that people know, but a bunch of mid-sized companies people don't.
In some sense, what seems important is a business culture that has a mission or meaning to exist other than make shareholders money. I'd wager their employees will absolutely geek out about what the companies do throughout the organization. A lot of corporations these days, once you get above a couple of layers of management, is all fluff. I can't think of the last time I talked to a mid-level or above "engineering" manager in a tech company about any nuanced or interesting discussion about technology.
I feel like any time a company goes public they lose the ability to pass up on revenue. The C-suite report to the board, who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits.
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
> who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits
* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "maximize profits".
Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.
The board designs their compensation package that way because they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're acting in shareholders' interests.
https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
What is preventing you from competing with Slack and doing “good things at scale”?
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.
37signals?
It's pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.
That seems like a pretty tough argument to make, to be honest.
No, 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.
> Good luck convincing me, though.
Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll pass.
TLDR "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."
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280 and marked it off topic.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us all to be kind; they're the first words in the "In Comments" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How is this helpful for the non-profit?
And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.
What does grief have to do with it?
why would you not be sad about something great you lost ? Even if it was "just a freebie" ?
The 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?
Only 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.
And they are already migrating things to Mattermost. So again, how does talking about the stages of grief help?
Years 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
Years 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
Trying to figure out if this was the result of the sheer exhilaration of smashing the post button or a humiliation kink where you want people to yell at you
> $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
Pissing 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
Hack 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.
I 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.
There 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-Billin...
[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro
> 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.
Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.
Would make much more sense to use Discord.
Discord has a terrible permissions model. In Slack, anybody can create bots and channels without Workspace Admin. Slack worked best for the usecase, by far.
Well 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.
The 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
You need to send them a legal notice asserting that. At minimum it will get you another month or two to plan your exit.
Requiring a legal notice at any point should disqualify a chat software immediately. Good on them to make the move and other users of Slack should be wary.
Perhaps there is more to the story, but my surprise about the business culture of Salesforce isn't too pronounced to be honest. Had do happen at some point in my opinion.
>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 don't know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I've supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per 'user' but then during the setup try to get you to start including a bunch of users or change how users are defined to include extra people that are only tangentially related to the day to day operations. One I support, I found out I get charged extra for users of one of the modules beyond the seat charge to already have them in the program.
Or my favourite aspect of this: SaaS that have no facility to avoid charging a per-seat fee for each test user (and of course, each test run needs to create/delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)
Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn't non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it's a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
This is a good point to know about. I'm not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of "small" or "large", but typically when we are talking about SaaS costs, well that would depend on the number of seats or licenses. So for example, the Prevent Cancer Foundation might have millions of dollars in assets per year, they only have 26 employees[0], so in a way, they are a "small" nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.
[0]: https://preventcancer.org/about-us/team/
The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee's
We’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.
Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.
They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.
Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.
Teams 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.
I 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.
Chat? 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.
So instead of doing one thing well, it does a bunch of things poorly?
What are your experienced differences?
Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.
I used Teams just before Covid (last job I had used it). For one messages didn't arrive in the same order for everyone, so chat histories often didn't make sense, with replies appearing above the messages they were replying to. The other thing I recall was slow loading time. Slack is _snappy_, moving from channel to channel is very fast, as if nothing ever needs to load (it does, it just cleverly preloads everything except images it seems like). The interface was just far less intuitive as well.
At the end of the day, just about every team that I worked with had a WhatsApp group that they actually used to chat in. Having a bad product as your internal chat is how you get shadow IT like WhatsApp where people are discussing your proprietary information on a third party service.
Mailing 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.
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”. “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?
I'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). 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.
the point is that the slack isn't just used to communicate important work stuff, it's also used to chat with friends and such.
Not 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.