Hackclub is small Nonprofit it may be this https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac...

So it seems like Slack took them off the nonprofit plan. That's a different story altogether and makes more sense for the timeline involved.

If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad

I can't imagine any scenario that justifies an out-of-the blue demand of $50k within a week or your data is deleted. The only way this isn't an awful thing to inflict on a teen education nonprofit is if there have been conversations happening that weren't disclosed in the post - conversations that would have illuminated this possibility.

Not saying this is the case, or that slack thinks it is, but -

If slack found out that the company isn't really a non-profit, or that it violated the requirements in the non-profit agreement (such as promoting discrimination) it would justify a demand for immediate payment in my opinion.

The article says slack took them off the non profit plan, set the price at $5000/year and they paid it and were happy to. It's not a long article.

Hack Club was on a grandfathered free nonprofit plan, but switched to a 5k/year on earlier this year under a special deal with Slack. Now the price is increased to 50k one time, and then 200k a year

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

There is no obligation to provide the "grandfathered" free plan forever, they could have taken that away too. Presumably they switched to get some features they wanted that weren't on their old plan. Slack can take away the old deal as easy as the new, staying on the old is no guarantee Slack will let you keep it forever.

Right - there is so much context missing. Extrapolating just a little, it looks like the story is something more like "We had too many users for our existing free plan, so we switched to a paid plan that had a first-year discount of 97%. We didn't really pay attention to the fine print, and now we've got a nasty letter demanding lots of money."

Not defending Slack / Salesforce. You just can't deal with them with that level of naivety.

i don't know if your surmises are correct. But my point is just that this seems irrelevant to Slack ending the deal. If they had stayed on the existing "grandfathered" plan, Slack could still be ending it. So I don't see the relevance. There's no reason to think they would be safer if they had stayed on a "grandfathered" plan that isn't even offered anymore, in fact it's often safer to switch to a currently offered plan if they're offering you a reasonable one, figuring they'll end the grandfathered one sooner than a currently offered one. That alone could be reason to switch in fact.

Right. The sensible thing to do would have been to develop a migration strategy as soon as you hear words like "grandfathered" or "first-year discount".

Slack moved us off the free plan to the 5k plan, which is fair considering thousands of users; it costs money to host those servers.

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