It&#x27;s pretty much just rent extraction, or even feudalism, which you could argue is the end result of unchecked capitalism.

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&#x2F;PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren&#x27;t maximizing value.You&#x27;d need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kr-asia.com&#x2F;at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-sweeping-the-pool-robot-market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kr-asia.com&#x2F;at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...</a>&gt;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.&gt;“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.”

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.

Not even &quot;do good&quot;; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s exactly the ethos you&#x27;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&#x27;m reading this book because, well, that&#x27;s the kind of place I&#x27;d like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunitiesEdit: here&#x27;s a Wikipedia page on the topic <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hidden_champions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hidden_champions</a>

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.”

Yep, I like small companies that are happy being small companies.

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.

&gt; 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.

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 love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn&#x27;t rely on them.

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

We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don&#x27;t miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack

Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted &lt;1min ago)

Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.

&gt; Their &quot;threads&quot; 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&#x27;t be found again.I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it&#x27;s quickly lost.

We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I&#x27;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 &quot;threads&quot; 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&#x27;t be found again.

It seems like many features of Mattermost are not open source. Maybe Zulip is better?

First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this article

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?

Slack is transitioning to the salesforce per user pricing for all accounts and deliberately crippling the free product to force migration.

the extortion likely worked more than it doesn&#x27;t, so is kept going

So it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan.
That&#x27;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

Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Nonprofits-discount" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...</a>

Why did they switch? Given the information provided, it seems that paying anything, if you&#x27;re on a grandfathered free plan, is a bad deal.

Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k&#x2F;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

It was no longer the free nonprofit plan since a few years back, and there was a special contract drawn with HC (that&#x27;s the 5000&#x2F;yr mentioned in the original post).

Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don&#x27;t understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?

See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;stable&#x2F;production&#x2F;install.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;stable&#x2F;production&#x2F;install.ht...</a>

It is open source and you can self host it.

It&#x27;s OSS and self-hostable. And it&#x27;s got a great UI and the most joyous technology I&#x27;ve ever had the pleasure of using. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;self-hosting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;self-hosting&#x2F;</a>

go to product &gt; self-hostingyou might notice it&#x27;s 100% free softwarenow there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like &quot;general&quot;, &quot;food&quot;, &quot;events&quot; or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad&#x2F;project&#x2F;sprint&#x2F;whateverbut the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a &quot;social network&quot; focused tool and a work place communications focused tooland Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later

Unless I&#x27;m missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it&#x27;s a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven&#x27;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&#x27;ll have more control over.I&#x27;d probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I&#x27;m sure there are other alternatives out there too

I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!

So many stories like this about Slack.We use Zulip (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.org&#x2F;</a>) for our corporate chat, and we&#x27;ve never looked back. It&#x27;s been good, and it&#x27;s fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

It&#x27;s a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it&#x27;s very pathetic that Slack doesn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.

&quot;we want something that is standard&quot;.Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft&#x27;s cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.

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 useEventually this leads to pressure to give them newer&#x2F;better toolsSometimes, 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 thatIt also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impressionStill 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 themI’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 toolsAll 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

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 &quot;internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff&quot;, &quot;even though they work, the internal apps are old&quot;, &quot;we want something that is standard&quot;, &quot;we can&#x27;t fall behind the other firms&quot;. 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&#x27;t be used.

&quot;This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law&quot;

Don&#x27;t subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you&#x27;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.

Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...

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

It&#x27;s not just cloud SaaS apps, it&#x27;s everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every &quot;free&quot; email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you&#x27;re at risk.It&#x27;s certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don&#x27;t think any of them are &quot;safe&quot; 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 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.

&gt; refuse to let them export itHonestly, it&#x27;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&#x27;d get out: maybe that&#x27;s data export, maybe it&#x27;s solid contracts. If they don&#x27;t offer this or you can&#x27;t afford it... well, don&#x27;t use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn&#x27;t burn down.

I think it&#x27;s a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that&#x27;s too high. Someone then has to say &quot;no&quot;.Everyone starts off with a price that&#x27;s too low because you want a &quot;no&quot; from a customer to be &quot;no, because your product isn&#x27;t useful to me&quot; and not &quot;no, I don&#x27;t have that kind of money&quot;. (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0&#x2F;month. I would not like it for $200&#x2F;month. If it costs them $200&#x2F;month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)

I don&#x27;t think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn&#x27;t be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going &quot;pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data&quot;

Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X&#x2F;year, the service is worth $X&#x2F;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.

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

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.

Only if sysadmin time is $0&#x2F;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.

I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their &quot;root servers&quot; are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage&#x2F;raid management included.

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

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&#x27;s not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don&#x27;t stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it&#x27;s &quot;easy&quot; 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&#x27;t have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.

Set it up earlier than late, if you&#x27;re expecting 7 days notice before deletion

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.

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&#x2F;extortion?

If they start doing this to academic accounts... I&#x27;ll have to set up some Mattermost instances...

I&#x27;m not saying that you shouldn&#x27;t spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I&#x27;m definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech.However the value of money is quite absolute, it&#x27;s dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than &quot;pretty big&quot;, then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.

It&#x27;s not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that&#x27;s not for tech, it&#x27;s just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there&#x27;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).

Sure, but COMSOL does a lot of work for you you couldn&#x27;t achieve otherwise - I find it hard to see glorified irc (slack) as ever being worth $200k a year!!!

In the article, this isn&#x27;t a business. It&#x27;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.

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).

Even $50,000&#x2F;yr would be way too much for a chat service nevermind to just stave them off for a week.

This sentence was referring to the $50,000 payment that Slack demanded in the next few days.

&gt; a pretty massive sum of moneyI 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.

Because the calculation is that if:N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K &gt; N * $5KThen its a profitable operation for slack.

Agreed, it&#x27;s bizarre. $5,000&#x2F;yr &gt; $0&#x2F;yr. There&#x27;s no way the operational costs from this specific customer exceed $5,000&#x2F;yr.

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 businessIf you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy

They&#x27;re not an independent business, their pricing is probably decided by Salesforce. It&#x27;s probably bundled in free for Salesforce customers who buy a minimum of X seats.

It&#x27;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&#x27;ll get paid $0 (because obviously the non-profit can&#x27;t afford the new price) and they won&#x27;t get their product in front of those students.See similar example of Microsoft losing mindshare with the next generation in the early&#x2F;mid 2000&#x27;s by locking down paid access to all their developer tooling&#x2F;documentation.

I genuinely don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

What I&#x27;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&#x27;d enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they&#x27;re willing to provide it as well.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to work for &quot;communities&quot; but if they agreed to such a special deal they shouldn&#x27;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.

Exactly what you’d expect from a sales department at risk of missing their arr target this quarter.

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 &#x2F; bully negotiating tactic.

Yeah, like, it&#x27;s weird to wish for more details, because I&#x27;m sure Hack Club is wishing they also had more details right now! If they knew the what and why of it, it&#x27;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&#x27;s due in 5 days or you&#x27;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?

The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I&#x27;d argue that for their scale, 200k&#x2F;yr from 5k&#x2F;yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I&#x27;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.

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?

I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I&#x27;m aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it&#x27;s integrations are poor generally.

It&#x27;s a CRM. AI won&#x27;t help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.

Salesforce as a company hasn&#x27;t been innovative in 20 years. It&#x27;s no surprise that they can&#x27;t make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.

I don&#x27;t understand why Slack hasn&#x27;t fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don&#x27;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&#x2F;month&#x2F;user for this.

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.

It&#x27;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&#x27;s grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce&#x27;s most universally-used products.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;story&#x2F;2025-09-02&#x2F;salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-says-he-cut-4-000-support-roles-because-of-ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;story&#x2F;2025-09-02&#x2F;salesforce...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;91359024&#x2F;salesforce-using-ai-artificial-intelligence-for-half-workload-marc-benioff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;91359024&#x2F;salesforce-using-ai-art...</a>

Slack added AI features for something like ~$5&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo poorer.Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s crazy.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai</a>

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&#x27;t.For my teams the &quot;modern&quot; solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it&#x27;s 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.

IMHO &quot;allow&quot; 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.

Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?

&gt; 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&#x2F;customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?

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&#x27;s probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else&#x27;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&#x27;t reading through people&#x27;s DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.

Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing

Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.

Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads

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.

In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.

In Hack Club, a lot. I&#x27;m a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.

I&#x27;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&#x27;m going to have to ask again about the same thing.

We use Slack extensively and I&#x27;m searching for info in conversations from months or even years ago regularly.

Let&#x27;s be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?

Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zulip.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;who-owns-your-slack-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zulip.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;who-owns-your-slack-histor...</a>

The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don&#x27;t have a high bar for being accepted.

&gt; only if your company has legal or compliance requirementsclearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery

In 30 places, it&#x27;s also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you&#x27;re in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be &#x27;in control&#x27; 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.

Makes some sense that the owner can&#x27;t just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:&quot;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.&quot;So they have the tech built, you just aren&#x27;t allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

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.

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&#x27;t going to crank to the moon.

I had the same reaction. I believe that it&#x27;s the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There&#x27;s no comparison for me. I&#x27;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.

What are your experienced differences?Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.

Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn&#x27;t come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.

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&#x27;s nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.

They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There&#x27;s an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?

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.

Slack&#x27;s user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they&#x27;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.

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.

Is it even possible to migrate 10 years of message history out of Slack?

Does give you more things to &#x27;hack&#x27; for the club. Not all bad I guess, and saving that amount of money is worth creating some &#x27;new projects&#x27;.

mattermost is so so so clunky and uncomfortable, but hey, it&#x27;s free...

I&#x27;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&#x2F;year?

I personally see any kind of subscription as a technical debt.

I&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.

The post says they&#x27;re moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.

&gt; Searching in chat channel for a specific problem is not a good way to handle documentationI 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.

&gt; 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&#x27;t even use search engines to search that.

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.’

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.

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&#x27;t get if you self host is the mobile notifications. This happened recently and it&#x27;s a bummer but that&#x27;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.

Unfortunately it works. Companies will never go back - who would give up the opportunity to extract more from customers on demand?

Perpetual licenses aren’t a panacea given that old software doesn’t have infinite OS support. Or sometimes even decades of support is lacking.

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 &quot;develop new revenue streams&quot;.

I&#x27;m selfhosting rocket for a small team (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rocket.chat&#x2F;install" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rocket.chat&#x2F;install</a>). I think they have a limited number of users, but the license is MIT.

&gt; 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&#x27;t really just a nonprofit that gives people things, it&#x27;s also a community. So it&#x27;s less about documentation and more about people&#x27;s chats with each other. (disclaimer: i am not official hack club hq)

Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don&#x27;t seem to be anywhere in the software repository.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;basecamp&#x2F;once-campfire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;basecamp&#x2F;once-campfire</a>

That&#x27;s an outdated license web page dated 2024, see &quot;Copyright © 2024&quot; 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&#x27;s tweet:<pre><code> Campfire...it&#x27;s now 100% free...and open source.
</code></pre>
Here&#x27;s a quote from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;basecamp&#x2F;once-campfire&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;MIT-LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;basecamp&#x2F;once-campfire&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;MIT-LICE...</a><pre><code> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
 a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
 &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction...
</code></pre>
[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;jasonfried&#x2F;status&#x2F;1966559597117964560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;jasonfried&#x2F;status&#x2F;1966559597117964560</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;98t9vx.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;98t9vx.png</a>

Campfire is definitely not FOSS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;once.com&#x2F;license" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;once.com&#x2F;license</a>

Why not Element&#x2F;Matrix?It seems to be a more popular and mature choice, and it is open source too.

There&#x27;s really nothing like Slack in my uninformed opinion.

Since you&#x27;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 &quot;lost&quot; 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.<pre><code> [0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;once.com&#x2F;campfire (recently became FOSS) 
 [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com</code></pre>

great article and I really hope that hack club continues on without slack, and maybe even do better.

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.

FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com&#x2F;fiscal-sponsorship&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com&#x2F;fiscal-sponsorship&#x2F;</a>). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop&#x2F;transactions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop&#x2F;transactions</a>

Have you thought about moving to Discord? I&#x27;m sure it won&#x27;t be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.

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

Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There&#x27;s a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it&#x27;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.

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 :&gt;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&#x2F;teens.

&gt; don&#x27;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 &quot;pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days&quot;, I&#x27;d say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.It&#x27;s not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.

Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list&#x27;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&#x27;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]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;ZelphirKaltstahl&#x2F;server-management&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;main&#x2F;roles&#x2F;services&#x2F;setup-zulip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;ZelphirKaltstahl&#x2F;server-management&#x2F;src&#x2F;...</a>

Discord server it is! &#x2F;s (but not really)

Slack used to allow you to connect your own clients using open standards. And then they suddenly didn&#x27;t.

&gt; a nonprofit teaching coding to kidsthat&#x27;s a perfect teaching occasion, then!Kids: don&#x27;t use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!

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.

Why were you defacto ready to be unsympathetic? Sympathy is my default.

Welp -- this explains why Slack&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Looks like it&#x27;s time for them to sponsor an open source Slack-killer.

Financials are here, not too surprising if sales at Slack saw this they&#x27;d charge more<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;812908499" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;812...</a>

Slack doesn&#x27;t even know this is happening. I get the feeling the decision on SF&#x27;s part was as autonomic as scratching an itch.

It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack&#x27;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.

I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it&#x27;s a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com&#x2F;</a>(They do help clubs sell things, taking &quot;7% of income&quot;, so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)

$5k might represent 4 hours of labor for all employees. Switching costs are real.

We use a lot of Slack specific features, especially bots, and it&#x27;s more of a pain to move thousands of users and channels than to just pay up.

This doesn&#x27;t address everything, but I thought I&#x27;d chime on specifically on the chat history question. It&#x27;s still early days for support from most IRCd&#x27;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&#x27;s likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team&#x2F;company&#x2F;community&#x2F;whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.

Yes, and that&#x27;s a feature, not a bug. It forces you to use chat as chat and a wiki as a wiki. You&#x27;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.

Doesn&#x27;t an IRC server have no concept of chat history? Not really comparable. Setting up the server is the easy part, it&#x27;s migrating their integrations, updating docs, copying over history, educating users, etc, that is the hard part.

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.

&gt; Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000&#x2F;year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonableTheir 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&#x27;ll personally teach each of your users to use it.

Cory Doctorow has called this &quot;enshittification&quot; and it seems to be a universal process across the tech industry.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t the end state.

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.

welcome to hacking, i guess.  this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry

I&#x27;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.

Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?

Another good lesson here: at the end of the day, these are just websites. Don&#x27;t lose sleep over it. If it&#x27;s broken for a couple of days, that&#x27;s ok.

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&#x27;t break. It&#x27;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)

Campfire is free now if you can host yourself. Probably good enough.

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.

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.

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.

Join us now and share the software. You’ll be free.

This when you need a slack exporter ! And a slack import eligible software !

I pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don&#x27;t need to be &quot;cutting edge&quot; all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.

Well now I&#x27;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 &quot;customer&quot; instead of an &quot;internal employee&quot;. If not, then yes I could see why it would be expensive.

Feels like Slack is not a good fit for that particular use case.Would make much more sense to use Discord.

&gt; Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per monthThis 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&#x27;s primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.&gt; then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a &quot;small nonprofit&quot; to me.those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.

This is a good point to know about. I&#x27;m not too sure about how non-profits can be categorized in terms of &quot;small&quot; or &quot;large&quot;, 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 &quot;small&quot; nonprofit compared to others that might have hundreds of employees.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preventcancer.org&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;team&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preventcancer.org&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;team&#x2F;</a>

Hack Club is a non-profit community, so the bulk of their user count isn&#x27;t non-profit employees or even volunteers or mentors, it&#x27;s a bunch of kids hanging out and making cool stuff.Maybe that doesn&#x27;t move the needle on whether they&#x27;re a small non-profit or not for you, but it&#x27;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.

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&#x2F;delete a test user, to test the sign-up flow)

&gt;maybe it&#x27;s because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help&#x2F;services at their nonprofit) are treated as &quot;active members&quot; of their Slack instance?I don&#x27;t know anything about slack, but a lot of the saas programs I&#x27;ve supported do something similar where they negotiate a price per &#x27;user&#x27; 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.

The 2,000 active members are teens and not notprofit employee&#x27;s

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&#x27;s because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help&#x2F;services at their nonprofit) are treated as &quot;active members&quot; of their Slack instance?I&#x27;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 &quot;small nonprofit&quot; to me.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-Policy#how-youre-billed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;pro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;pro</a>

Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)

It&#x27;s just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade&#x27;s shadiest developers.

Oh so there’s a history of dark patterns too? Colour me surprised.

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&#x27;m the only member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI

Slack&#x27;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&#x27;t have quite enough information about their clients&#x27; businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they&#x27;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.

Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year