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<p>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)<p>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

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.<p>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.<p>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.

Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in <i>advance</i>. This is very shortsighted.

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....<p><a href="https://hackclub.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hackclub.com/</a><p>(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 <i>army</i> of student interns.)

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)

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.<p>Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].<p>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?<p>Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.<p><pre><code> [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) [1] https://zulip.com</code></pre>

One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for <i>every</i> company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel <i>and</i> internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them.<p>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.<p>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 <i>generation</i> or more of customers.

According to the Slack HQ account on Reddit, the situation has been resolved: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack_extorting_a_nonprofit_that_supports/newvtof/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1njuchb/why_is_slack...</a><p>>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 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.<p>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...

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.

That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory.<p>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.<p>This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.

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: <a href="https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser</a><p>I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)<p>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

+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.<p>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.<p><a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizations/zulip" rel="nofollow">https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...</a>

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.<p>Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.

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. <a href="https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitations-on-user-count-mattermost-community-version/11580/5" rel="nofollow">https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...</a>

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.<p>It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.

Based on California’s Automatic Renewal Law and contract principles, what you’ve described raises serious concerns:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Recommendations:<p>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.<p>Request a 90-day transition period to migrate, framed as reasonable and legally necessary under consumer protection standards.<p>Escalate to Salesforce legal/compliance. If necessary, copy the California Attorney General’s consumer protection unit.<p>Preserve evidence. Save all communications, invoices, and contract copies.<p>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.

From Zach, founder of Hack Club:<p>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.<p>I have some great news. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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

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.

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.

There are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0]. One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why.<p>Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_price_35_increase/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...</a>

I really wish this post had more details.<p>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?<p>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?

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.

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)

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.

Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad.<p>Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.<p>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.

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.<p>My dream work chat app:<p>1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations<p>2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed<p>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)

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: <a href="https://github.com/rusq/slackdump" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rusq/slackdump</a>. Is there any alternative chat system that will import these dumps?

Classic Salesforce. The exact same thing happened with our org and Heroku. Zero empathy, just pony up or we trash your company.

I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough.<p>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.<p>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.

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).<p>I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?

Something similar happened to another independent tech educator who was running a slack community for his niche. [1]<p>Slack has completely gone down hill since the salesforce acquisition.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/adrian_cantrill_tech_study_slack_deleted/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...</a>

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]<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/</a>

I’ve always loved Slack. It’s been core to how we work, and I’ve recommended it to countless others.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

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

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.

You could rent a server + hire an infra engineer full time to manage chat for just this amount of money

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).<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai</a>

> 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.<p>Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though.<p>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.

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.

>Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost.<p>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.

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.<p>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?

Slack responded on twitter: <a href="https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/slackhq/status/1968716216404439173</a>

Zulip is much better alternative due it it's threaded nature and it have nice slack import tool. Please give a try.

Just self-host Matrix/Synapse with Element <a href="https://element.io/" rel="nofollow">https://element.io/</a>, I don't know why more people don't do this.

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.

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.

If others find themselves in a similar situation you could look at <a href="https://once.com/campfire" rel="nofollow">https://once.com/campfire</a>

Even $5k/year seems insane to me for hosting what is essentially an IRC channel...

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?

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).<p>Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.<p>The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open.<p>For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile

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.

As long as consumer protection is an afterthought companies will continue to change their agreements after purchase and screw over consumers.<p>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.<p>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?<p>We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation.<p>I just can't trust anything anymore.

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 use pikapods to cheaply host a couple Open Source apps. They support Mattermost: <a href="https://www.pikapods.com/apps" rel="nofollow">https://www.pikapods.com/apps</a>

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.

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...<p>Fyi, Campfire is open source now: <a href="https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire</a>

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 have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very responsive as backend support.<p>I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.<p>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.<p>I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.

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.<p>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.<p>They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.

Consider building your own (many large communities do). <a href="https://getstream.io/chat/" rel="nofollow">https://getstream.io/chat/</a><p>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.)

“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.

I personally would’ve gone for matrix since it’s free and open source, but I’m sure this license will be better..

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.<p>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!<p>My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.

How does contract law allow this? Is this tactic a common pattern for VC funded or acquired companies?

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.

No first hand experience, but campfire (<a href="https://once.com/campfire" rel="nofollow">https://once.com/campfire</a>) seems like a pretty great solution for this problem.<p>Not affiliated, just sharing in case it’s useful for OP or others.

So many stories like this about Slack.<p>We use Zulip (<a href="https://zulip.org/" rel="nofollow">https://zulip.org/</a>) 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.

It's OK to end a discount program, but not by threatening to delete everything with 7 days notice.

<a href="https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack" rel="nofollow">https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack</a>

Integrating linen[0] might be a good way to backup the messages and provide an off ramp in the meantime<p>0: <a href="https://www.linen.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linen.dev/</a>

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.

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.

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?

I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812908499" rel="nofollow">https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...</a><p>In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.

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.

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.

Let's hope Slack learns from this and fixes their billing procedure at least. Intentional or not.

Did you have a special deal with Slack? I don't understand how they can just increase the price with a few days notice?

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.

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.<p>Or you can use an out of the box host, but then your data is not in your direct control.

sad that open protocols lost chat wars.<p>Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch of people clueless about average user's woes.<p>"let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server some things just outright not work!"

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?

Maybe someone here can archive? I did a quick search for it, and landed at: <a href="https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/" rel="nofollow">https://australia.hackclub.com/slack/</a><p>…Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com

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.

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.<p>Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till February but this would make a nice Christmas project.

SaaS is a trap. They silo up your business data then hold it hostage.

Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing.<p>Take care about how you plan infrastructure.

They're serving notice. Data in vendor custody belongs to the vendor, not to the customer. Customers can go to court to prove otherwise.

Slack is still a thing?<p>At this rate it's cheaper to pay a full time DevOps team to run several Matrix servers so you have high availability.

Personally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative.<p>There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman <<a href="https://stallman.org/slack.html" rel="nofollow">https://stallman.org/slack.html</a>>

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.<p>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.<p>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.

The cloud is other people's computers.

Do not use Slack.

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.

> 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<p>Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? That’s some big city mobster tactics right there

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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

It's a real shame how software that starts out really well, always adopts horrible and unreasonable monetization tactics once adoption is high enough

Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?

If they start doing this to academic accounts... I'll have to set up some Mattermost instances...

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

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.<p>Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.

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Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:<p>"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."<p>So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

Gives real Salesforce energy.

Important to know how to get out of a service faster than you got into it.

The chickens have come home to roost.

>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>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.

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

saas are really owning themselves by pulling crap like this.<p>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.

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.

Nothing to see here, only yet another case of vendor lock in and the unfortunate decision to use anything but FOSS.

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Anyone has given Campfire a shot? Might be a good option

Can obe simply export all the data and dump that in Dropbox (for interim).<p>Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no lost data that way.

Are there no contracts? How is this legal? My European mind cannot comprehend.

Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.

Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?

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).<p>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.<p>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.

Switch to teams. Not that hard.

Please consider IRC or something open protocol instead.

You could pay for 200-300 MS Teams seats for a <i>decade</i> with that kind of money pile, or a F100-sized Oracle database instance.<p>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.<p>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 <i>this</i> 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.

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.

It's Salesforce...<p>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...

We switched to Pumble years ago for price, longer data retention & more consistency.

Wonder how the ROI on this is going to be for salesforce.

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.

well thanks Slack ! now I know about Zulip ! which looks quite nice<p>cheers to all

This is remarkably familiar.

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!<p><a href="https://www.discourse.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.discourse.org/</a><p><a href="https://flarum.org/" rel="nofollow">https://flarum.org/</a><p><a href="https://www.simplemachines.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.simplemachines.org/</a>

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

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.<p>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.

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

What a dick move to do that.

$200k for chat is insane. Even $5k for chat is insane

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.

Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.

Maybe Mattermost is solution?

> a pretty massive sum of money<p>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.

Tell Slack to go ** themselves, and move everything to a free platform that the teens and kids already use: Discord.

Maybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month:<p>- <a href="https://once.com/campfire" rel="nofollow">https://once.com/campfire</a><p>- <a href="https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire</a><p>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.

A reminder that the only thing worse than paying for software is renting cloud SaaS & ceding them all your data.<p>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.

I see what salesforce is doing here. Trying to force a sale.

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 wish discord worked better for work

I guess history repeat.

Move to Zulip already...

"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"<p>Hypothetical easy win for Slack here.

should just switch to discord. each project can have its own server

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.<p>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.

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).<p>They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their proprietary enterprise software product.<p>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.

they could have migrated to Microsoft Teams.

Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc

I'm assuming SLACK is somehow under bot DDOS.

That's so annoying, but all things considered, a universal blessing in disguise now that the team is moving to an open source solution.<p>Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.

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.

Time to switch to Mattermost.

switch to an open source forum or chat platform and never go proprietary again!

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

Ok, I really think this is going to cost me karma, but the snyde remark has to be made.<p>They don't do "Sales", they do "Salesforce"d.

No sane person should pay even those $5k a year for a STUPID CHAT APP!!!<p>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!

Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!

Please frame this post for when somebody dismisses FOSS "ideologues" with "be pragmatic, right tool for the right job".

this is bad<p>but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway<p>developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one<p>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

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

expensive IRC with history

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.

not only is there at least a hundred other open source equivalent apps

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

Question must be asked: why would anyone teach teenagers coding these days?<p>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.

Make your own Slack?

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> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable<p>Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.<p>Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.<p>For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.

the extortion likely worked more than it doesn't, so is kept going

<nelson>Ha-Ha!</nelson> That's what you get for not using self hosted OSS in the first place....

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.<p>Sympathetic to the customers, but not surprised.

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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

Bring back IRC lol

That’s not what extortion means.

> $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid<p>when you are that stupid to "happily" pay 5k a year for their chat tool, you deserve that raise to 195k

Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.<p>==<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Charities-discount" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-for-the-Slack-for-Education-discount" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...</a>

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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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I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.

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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.

Have you tried IRC?

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?<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-Policy#how-youre-billed" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://slack.com/pricing/pro" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/pricing/pro</a>

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

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.

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).<p>All of our <i>real</i> 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.

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.<p>I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such.<p>Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.