> refuse to let them export it

Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.

You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.

Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).

But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.

It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not my intent at all.

Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan -- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it. It's a harsh lesson when something this happens.

Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes (or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but you can't control what they do. You can only control your choices.

It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk.

It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.

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

Slack has an API, presumably official and non-official.

A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...

Rate limits are bad (2/min for channel history). We've explicitly been told not to scrape API, since admins are working on exporting the data into Mattermost.

Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar.

Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.

A law would be better, otherwise companies will remove data export functionality.

Even a daily export won't save you from the export functionality disappearing with zero notice, because it's really disruptive to try and stop using a service with zero notice. Your company will be left with several weeks if not months of un-exported data.

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

People rarely get to actually negotiate contracts with a SaaS company. Unless you’re a very large customer it’s simply not worth their time. Such imbalances regularly give rise to regulations in other parts of the economy see automotive lemon laws etc.

Most SaaS companies can disable data exports at any time. Even if you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.

I think it’s more than export. Once you export your data you have to be able to import it into some other alternative and have it be useful. For example, even if you have the ability to export everything into some archive, it would be tedious to go find old conversations in slack from some offline archive versus searching for it in whatever you have moved to. I think all these online applications rely on lock in and end up extorting you at some point. We need better regulations for data portability.

The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.

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

I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange.

It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.

As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use

Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools

Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that

It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression

Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them

I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools

All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example

"Eventually" often means 30 years later. Computer Associates was a pure customer abuse house for 20 years; many Oracle products have been that way for 35 years.

Enterprise software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is as a rule abysmal. My model of how this happens is that there are large barriers to entry, and actually working well is not one of them, because the guy signing the PO doesn't have visibility into whether they work well or not. I don't know what the barriers are, but I suspect they include hiring people who already know CTOs, bribing ignorant shills like the Gartner Group, and having a convincing appear you'll still be in business in 10 years.

This is pretty sad. It sounds like emotion-driven FOMO than reason-driven decision-making. Or maybe CYA-driven decision-making ("migrated infrastructure to AWS", nobody ever was fired for buying AWS!).

I would very much understand it if the reasons given were like "We miss the following capabilities that our competitors have: ...", or "We have trouble interoperating with key partners", etc. These would be actually good reasons to pay more, and risk more.

Yeah that’s what I thought I said - that sometimes it’s legitimate need, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s...complicated.

I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to software - there are people who redo their kitchens every year because they can and people who are doing it for the first time in 30 years - it’s just what it is

"we want something that is standard".

Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.

Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.

We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s so cheap - 12$ for storage, chat, Video Call, Office, email.

Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025, MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery still doesn’t work reliably.

Google Suite is $14 at the Standard level: 2 TB per user, email, custom domain, video calls, docs / sheets, etc. Approximately 15% more expensive, but, really, it's two dollars more expensive, and I'd say the quality is better.

The problem with Google is that it is impossible to ever talk to anyone when you need support.

No support, poor integration with local file systems, their office is pretty basic. Plus it's Google, I personally trust it less than Microsoft. I still need Teams for calls with external partners, and I need proper Excel.

yeah its kind of annoying.

its not the amazing stack when i worked at $startup, but also we dont really spend any time futzing with it.

Microsoft releases a new feature, we get it. cool.

I was adding a calendar event on Teams (or was it "JS"-Outlook). I wanted to copy from another area in the app, but since it was a modal dialog, I couldn't. There's a button to pop up the "add event" dialog to be its own window. I clicked it, the add event window is now detached. But if course all the stuff I previously entered disappeared, what did I expect, that someone would bother to add code to prevent them from disappearing!?!

Counterpoint: if you are willing to pay $X/year, the service is worth $X/year to you or your business.

If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.

I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.

But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.

I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.

I think it's a fine argument to make. At some point, the price discovery mechanism has to ask someone a price that's too high. Someone then has to say "no".

Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)

I don't think anyone is contending that Slack shouldn't be able to raise their prices. The problem is raising the price 40x overnight, and then going "pay up in 1 week or we delete all your data"

Yeah, that’s fair. It is reasonable to expect companies to not be complete jerks.

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

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

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

Only if sysadmin time is $0/h.

I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.

Most of this stuff runs on autopilot once it's set up, which is why these companies have such huge margins.

That rounding error in accounting is also a monthly charge, and it sometimes happens that you get a spontaneous demand for $50K in a week and $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the world, and a sysadmin to manage it.