And Kübler-Ross did not describe a linear progression of grief. It was meant to be enough of a framework to start conversations, to put experiences in perspective, to help reflect. And plenty of times, life still has to go on even with devastation -- no time to grieve and reflect until crises has passed.
The wording of the co-founder's comment and the post did not strike me as grief. They are calling out enshittification without trying to burn bridges and requesting help.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us all to be kind; they're the first words in the "In Commemnts" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I used Solaris on Sun Fire machines and the support was unmatched, we got massive tome manuals that described in excruciating detail exactly how the system worked in almost all scenarios and a deep programming reference.
They never upselled us on anything, or changed the price.. until Oracle bought them and jacked the support costs up (though, to be perfectly fair, they ought to jack the support costs of old systems up).
They very much understood the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" mantra.
I'm sure Salesforce is terrified of growing their market cap by 3x
So yeah I made some money but I'd die before I was a salesforce dev again.
In my sample size of 2, this is always the case no matter where you work where the majority of revenue is derived by sales.
But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.
Runs Prime95 like a baws
I agree that it would be a very useful product.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...
The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
This is a thought I'm having lot as I get older. I've taken to judging people on how much what they say they work for in the world aligns with the profile of who they choose to work for. Not so much for unskilled in minimum wage work, but massively so for anyone who works in tech.
It pains me to see so many engineers younger than me convinced that they're bringing around positive changes with their career whilst working for companies and people who are demonstrably against everything they claim they're working for.
They are likely making a lot more than they would, otherwise, though.
We're all in the same boat.
Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this
This is at a fortune 500 company.
I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?
But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.
So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.
Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.
Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.
Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
The shadow IT model isn't the dominant one in the space where Salesforce play. They used that to a degree too when they were small, but they now lean towards enterprise sales. Shadow IT is sold as a risk by them. Want something secure, safe, and compliant? Work with us because we'll sign up to these things contractually (even if delivery is questionable.)
This means that a slack salesperson has to choose between targeting a department and pissing off IT versus working on a company-level deal. This changes behavior significantly. It also changes lots of the economic expectations. Previously, these little deals here and there could add up. On top, you might get credit from driving engagement. Now you carry a much larger quota where engagement is important in practice, but not in how sales is executed.
This drives the behavior you see here. Someone is reevaluating each of the current deals with this new lens. In practice, they can maximize revenue with these bullying tactics. Many times, in the enterprise space, it's better for a customer to be cut off, or give up, even if this is temporary. The intention is for the customer to return and agree to different terms even if the financials are adjusted to something more favorable.
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble.
Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions.
Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.
Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.
Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.
It’s the internet and you can decide what you want to type.
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.
And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters". They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
True whitehats are cucks, change my mind.
They too can buy the exploits off the market as well. Just, the price for the company is 25x higher than individual costs.
If corporations can price discriminate on non-EEOC metrics, so can I.
Almost every special rate I have ever negotiated had specific clauses about when the rate will end, even if there was no specific date there's always something about "rate is reviewed annually" or similar.
I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
The other thing is you cannot build anything sustainable by depending on the charity of a single company.
This wasn't charity from Slack. They paid for the service, and they can migrate if it's truly necessary.
To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and schools are not offered because large companies want to be nice, but because they want to catch future customers.
Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."
No reasonable person can have the expectation that a discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue forever!
At this discount, it really is charity.
The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it. (Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of future decision makers instead of Discord where these users all naturally congregate was a major win!)
To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit, is messed up.
It's more a tacit admission by Slack that their pricing model can't possible work for orgs that don't match a strict employer-employee model.
Nobody would agree to pay per-seat for every customer who uses a support tool, for example (which is much closer to the model this nonprofit is operating)
It doesn't matter that an alternate method of counting would be a lot more. They paid a reasonable amount for what they got.
$200k for this service is a joke, not the 'real' price.
Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
Slack was obviously unsuitable for them because Slack does not offer what they wanted (free for non-employees), but the decision maker blundered on. And now they want sympathy.
> The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
And in doing so Slack added that business model. And seemed happy about it.
> Slack does not offer what they wanted
They offered it to them.
> And now they want sympathy.
They deserve plenty of sympathy for Slack not giving them any reasonable warning as they torpedoed the deal. And it's not like they were draining Slack's resources or doing anything that made this an emergency.
Well, that's what you have lawyers for.
Otherwise, agreed with your comment.
TBH, in this specific case you don't even need to read the fine print to know that getting a $195k discount on a $200k bill is only a temporary thing!
On a smaller scale it happens on a monthly basis with telecomms - almost never with rates, but they amend privacy policy and stuff - as a customer a change in the contract gives you an opportunity to say you're not accepting new contract, within certain timeframe, and walk away.
I guess this is simmilar - they told them they are changing the contract, and under new circumstances they will have to pay this and that, but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
Still a dick move.
not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless 'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your data).
The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't even send a new contract.
If your rates were raised and you have not received new contract, if you can drop the service at that point, they can't collect including any cancellation fees.
If you want to continue using the service, that's a bit trickier.
You cannot insist on a clause that lets you change the contract at your discretion and having the resulting amended contract be valid without acceptance by the other party.
You can raise prices, you're just not guaranteed that a client will remain your client, and when you change the terms of the contract you void any contractual penalties as well.
We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
We did the migration in stages, basically this:
- Provide access to Teams
- Create all of the new teams / channels there
- Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
- Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
- Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
- Remove access to Slack
- Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
- Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
- Cancel Slack subscription
We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).
Or, they could not in some practical manner do searches on previous posts, so they didn’t use them?
I don't know their exact reasons, probably budget related since they were already using O365.
I can nearly guarantee it wasn't because Teams offers a better user experience. :D
At a high level though, Salesforce is often seen as a predatory company. Prices are high and they will squeeze their users for every nickel (as demonstrated here). They will also monetize your data in ways that you probably don't want.
Teams chat is pretty bad, I agree. But it does have these benefits:
- Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.
- Microsoft is probably a better steward of your data.
- Teams video / audio calls are much much better than Slack huddles.
- That's pretty much it tbhNot for long, at least for the EU and I assume for us in the EEA. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-readable_medium_and_data
Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.
There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.
It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.
Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.
One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.
Extensibility and integrations with learning management systems, as well as owning all your data, makes it sound like a great option in particular for an education-oriented organization.
And I imaging the AWS or GCP costs for hosting it won't be as high as what Slack wants.
- Zulip
- Matrix/Synapse and Element
- Mostlymatter [1] without #user limits
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...
[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.
My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.
I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
While I can't promise we won't ever change our exact monetization strategy, we're not venture-funded, and thus are immune to the usual enshittification pressures. https://zulip.com/values/ has some context.
(I lead the Zulip project)
* Threads are way better than in Slack. They're top level instead of just a bolted on afterthought. This means all your various conversations scale way better and are way easier to find than in Slack. I can't overstate this enough, it's a killer feature and genuinely improves the overall organisation of your communications
* Font size is just slightly smaller. My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I still think they get the balance of legibility and information density spot on, whereas Slack feels cartoony in comparison.
* Search felt a little better, I can't exactly put my finger on why or how, just that finding things in Slack always feels comparable to the iOS Mail search feature: very basic.
Drawbacks:
* There are less out of the box integrations I think.
That being said, we were able to get full data exports in the past when we were merging two companies into a single slack instance. YMMV
Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
It implies there is only one correct way to think or to prioritize or to approach a problem. It also (pointlessly) tries to shame someone for something that has already happened and cannot be reversed.
Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.
Slack is IRC with bells and whistles. Like yes I get that group chat is a necessity for today’s workforce. But it is still just group chat, a solved problem from a technical point of view.
Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end?
How many more times must we see it?
When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision.
If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it.
For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...
Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.
I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.
Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.
Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group.
That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema".
And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow".
End rant
Slack does not have these artificial barriers. You can invite single channel guests, or add them as full-fledged members. It's simple and logical.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
They're the same thing in terms of billing and data.
You said someone had called you. Why is that person not your point of contact? Was it your account executive? Are they not returning your calls? When they called you with this ultimatum, what was their response when you asked why you weren’t given longer notice?
> Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.
Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?
Back in 2006 everything was self hosted, and chat was - everyone sharing each others AIM accounts around the room. Everything should probably go back to self hosting, including our servers.
I've been using slack for years, since they didn't have video chat or any of that.
There are countless chat apps, including IRC. Slack's offering is that I can find messages or files on some subject from years ago with little effort in a matter of seconds. The history is the product IMO. The free 90 day version is worthless IMO, and barely better than IRC etc.
Slack's name is supposedly derived from "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".
I strongly disagree. The company I work at (sub-50 people) has never paid for Slack over our entire history (founded in 2009).
It's chat and it works fine. That's all it needs to be for us. We don't need to switch to IRC or one of the other countless chat apps.
We're never going to need to be indignant that Slack is suddenly asking us for more money and then rush to migrate. When they shut down the free tier, we'll take our ephemeral chat somewhere else.
Does it stay active w/ the ability to continue to use it minus the features of the paid account or is it shut down completely.
Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
You can integrate it into your app at far lower costs. Actually for what you're doing we're happy to sponsor the hosting at no costs.
This post serves as a cautionary tale about how privately owned walled gardens, no matter how pretty, leave you in a precarious position. I suspect being in control of their data and having an open source escape hatch is what’s driving the adoption of Mattermost.
closed source but you can export your data when you want to. mattermost is an open source slack. we are more of an API/SDK to build your own in-app chat/messaging as you want it.
It's open source and you own your own data.
This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.
Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
And then say sorry to convey some kind of human connection in the hopes you will be forgiven and the bottom line can be raised again.
No answer means this.
> We're fixing it
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
This was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing while we work with them directly to ensure their workspace remains fully accessible. We will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-ma...
And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.
(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )
One would like to know why were https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac... changes not applied to billing this time around?
With great power comes great responsibility.
Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:
Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.
For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.
That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.
It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.
The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287607 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
Ref: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/cloudflare_ddosed_its...
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.
Def do encourage the post mortem with root-cause analysis & robust corrective action plan. Thanks for being here.
What was this oversight? What caused it? What are you exactly doing to prevent it from happening in the future?
You mean you won't guarantee. You could guarantee this if you invested in customer service. Choosing not to do so is a choice.
So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.
There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked is because this one blew up in in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.
I think this is the most important finding from this story. It's not that someone has mistakenly billed a non-profit, but that this form of "customer relations" is apparently part of the standard billing process for business customers.
They are free to do so of course, but I imagine that this may impact customer retention if the practice continues. This short notice is something that I would have reacted very strongly about if I had integrated Slack so deeply in my business as the OP did. With the push for workflows, agents and additional functionality, it is actually a huge risk to the business if you get a short notice to migrate if the new terms can not be met.
If Hack Club did pony up the $200k the rep would probably be compensated in some way. That would increase the propensity of a rep to strong arm with short deadlines and hold their 11 year chat history hostage even if it’s not the appropriate pricing for a non-profit.
Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future. When it comes to the rep getting paid they’ll become an expert at how to do it properly.
You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.
May I suggest a public post mortem so that the doubters can see that you went after the root cause?
Might be interesting for HN as well as big companies have mistakes in policy, teams and automated collections...
After this the billing department might just get a list of companies that are behind and start a process.
I would be not at all surprised if Benioff said the initial deal was a mistake and you’ve fixed it now.
Nevertheless glad to see someone here trying to put out the fire, even if in the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.
/s
Yeah, right. Tell us more.
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
>Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history?
Mattermost is self-hosted and enables full data control.
There's some organizations that want to move to Mattermost for various reasons.
It's important for them to bring along their data.
Wondering what your opinion might be?
Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure?
This is such a transparent lie that I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
There’s still a human account manager involved, it wasn’t an automated billing error.
This looks extremely deliberate to me. Are you seriously suggesting that one of your sales reps accidentally demanded $250k from a bunch of teenagers?
I think you don’t have to find the least charitable interpretation for what they’re saying. There can be something in the middle.
Because you've already made up your mind that they're the bad guy, so it doesn't matter what really happened. One of the prevailing rules at HN used to be engage with the most charitable interpretation of an argument. It's always a better conversation when it's followed - this thread has just devolved into a bunch of pile-on virtue signaling with no actual interest in engaging honestly.
It also looks like it only got addressed because it hit a someone with enough traction to go viral. That they had to resort to this channel at all raises questions in itself that go beyond the initial mistake and this particular customer.
So while I agree that we do not know yet what actually happened, the response from Salesforce so far does not really address these all concerns, and is not inconsistent with less charitable views on what's going on.
I think this is rightfully getting called out. With big power comes big responsibility.
It's the literal definition of virtue signaling - a bunch of folks with zero context jumping to conclusions of evil and malicious intent to satisfy their own needs to join the pile-on comments and show how fake mad they are.
I see a thread of accusations and statements, not questions and engagement.
> It also looks like it only got addressed
The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people? Most managers don't even get back to their direct reports in 24 hours, nonetheless getting a decision to someone higher up the ladder.
> I think this is rightfully getting called out
We agree in spirit but not execution.
You seem to think people are responding here the way they are merely for social standing. At least, that's what virtue signaling is at its core, having looked at some definitions. I think people are upset at the actions of Slack/Salesforce and are responding accordingly. That would be a more organic or genuine motivation (for lack of a better word), while "virtue signaling" discounts the validity of people's responses and reduces them to a hollow show. That is why I called your interpretation uncharitable.
> The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people?
We are commenting underneath a response by the CPO of Slack. There is a sibling comment by the CEO. I think they are aware.
People are calling them out on the things their resposes do not address, which I mentioned in my previous comment. It wouldn't even need to be answers to all the questions people have. The response could have included things like: this is not how we want to treat any of our customers; we will look into what went wrong and why; we will explain when we know and how we will try to prevent this from happening again.
That would have acknowledged the damage this issue does to the public perception of their business practices. Instead, they simply ignore all of that. Hence, people's reactions in here.
> We agree in spirit but not execution.
I agree that a lot of comments in here are quite emotional. I would be more wary if they were directed at a single individual acting in a personal capacity, instead of the representatives of a well-resourced corporation. The power imbalance matters a lot, and I think it makes a difference if someone rather more powerful is called out by more, rather than fewer, people.
"...the practice of conspicuously displaying one's good character, social conscience, or political alignment in order to gain praise, recognition, or social standing, often without taking meaningful action to support the cause one is professing to support".
People asking questions and attempting to engage are not virtual signaling, everyone else on their high horse throwing shade are doing exactly that. These comments are 100% pure worthless virtual signals that I expect to see on reddit, not HN.
> You seem to think people
I don't think, I know. Read the comments. No one here besides the original OP was impacted but everyone wants to pile-on and call them out with absolutely no real context while pulling conspiracy theories out of thin air and making statements about what must be true. I've seen very few actual posts where attempt to engage legitimately rather than some bullshit "gotcha!" comment.
> a response by the CPO of Slack
Yes, two days after the email was sent. Two days. Folks are whining that it wasn't "faster", that somehow these people are not reviewing every email that leaves the company. Worst case the OP wouldn't have paid, their Slack may have been disabled, and then when the CEO/CPO did find out the sales rep would have lost their job rather than what we're seeing here. But I believe that Slack would have done the right thing regardless.
> calling them out on the things their responses do not address
No most people are throwing accusations and making absolute statements of what they perceive to be truth. No one besides the original OP is entitled to a response from Slack, everyone else here is just using it as an opportunity to virtual signal. Why would anyone from Slack engage in this thread filled with hostility and zero lack of desire to understand what happened, because they're so convinced they already have the answer? These posters are tourists using this as an opportunity to show off how mad they are, not customers that deserve a response.
This thread is an embarrassment to the HN community, and we can go back years and find similar situations where company screwed up and will not find the vitriol found here.
I read what you wrote and I see pre-conceived notions about what is or is not going on at Slack, about the motivations of your fellow commenters and the worth of their contributions, no openness, but dismissal wrapped in an increasingly generous portion of vitriol. Take a look at your words, and tell me you're not even outdoing many of them. It's just your sympathies are aligned differently.
That in turn annoys me. Some part of me really wants to blame you, but I actually don't. What'd be the point? We're just getting caught up in this crap. I get it, it's frustrating! I'm frustrated, you sound frustrated, and if you want to give them that, the people you are complaining about are frustrated, too.
Isn't it interesting how these things perpetuate themselves in online discussions? Somebody manages to piss us off, and the first reflex is to piss right back. Does it make anybody feel better? No. It sucks.
So yeah, this thread is not a great example of the good aspects of humanity. Let's not perpetuate it. Let's do better. Let's do something nice. It's fall here, the leaves are turning red. There's the possibility of cake. Hopefully there's something pleasant waiting for you, too. I wish you a nice Sunday, wherever you are.
"Slack" didn't know anything. Slack isn't a human being. Like somehow everyone that joins the company connects a collective consciousness with shared memory.
> deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking
Clearly you were involved in the process and have fist-hand knowledge to be so confident lol. The crazy absurdity of everyone being so convinced of the conspiracy theories they've pulled out of their asses.
> given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.
Just a guess.
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
0 - https://accountinginsights.org/what-is-appreciation-in-accou...
Entire generations of executives and sales staff come and go over 11 years, and the sales team today is probably larger than the entire Slack org in 2014. It's not even hard to think of a dozen scenarios where some internal process was created to identify delinquent or over-leveraged accounts which end up in a spreadsheet used by some junior sales rep to run a playbook created by some manager that left the company years before they were hired.
> You have a very different definition of "appreciate"
Clearly one more generous than whatever you're expecting up on that high horse. They've made this entire situation right and have even sweetened the deal and a C-level executive responding in a public forum. It's completely reasonable for it to take time in a company this size for a situation like this to make it to the right decision maker that can set things right without getting lawyers involved.
What we should be rightly criticizing is the hostile enterprise sales pipeline that uses pressure tactics to close deals, escalating this situation by not giving customers time and space to deal with the surprise. I'm exhausted from dealing with hostile pushy enterprise sales teams.
I like to defend as much as the next person, but the defence from Slack ignores the approach.
"It was a mistake" isn't enough to gloss over the trouble, as a service provider, they caused. What a rug pull, and to then perhaps blame it on a sales person isn't right. They saw a lot of users and tried to extort, no negotiation.
Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?
I wish. It is common for communities to switch from Slack to Discord. I would rather prefer a self-hosted Mattermost server or Matrix but eh...
Using something browser bases puts you into a position where you have to choose between one or two browser engines and suffer however they manage the CPU and RAM.
Teams hogged the RAM and CPU when I used it in the browser, for what wasn't much more than IRC, and a terrible message archive. Mattermost isn't much better at searching either, and it's mostly glorified IRC channels. The only niche is perhaps mobile users, who, could arguably also use an IRC client or browser based one at that.
This was a process error that you and others have decided to make into something it isn't. If it was systemic we'd be hearing about more instances, but here we are.
> There's no such thing as "compliant" in this context, you totally made that up which reinforces this is beyond your scope of experience.
What an unnecessarily hostile take.
I see accusations and statements, not questions and discovery. Folks seem too busy grabbing their pitchfork to engage in an honest conversation on shitty enterprise sales tactics.
> There's no covenant or other legal obligation they have to be compliant with other than internal systems and controls ...
So in other words you've never worked at a large org, or been in a leadership position over hundreds of people.
> This was a process error that you and others have decided to make into something it isn't.
There's probably been no less than ~6 executives that have been responsible for sales operations in that time frame, and that the sales process has been revamped and changes to how revenue is generated just as many times.
"Slack" didn't do anything.
All I did was quote your own statements and make it clear this was the case. I cannot claim any "virtual [sic] signaling", as it is yourself who authored everything I posted excluding the disclaimer.
Wise is the person,
Who through discourse can see.
The anger one laments,
Originates within thee.
No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.
And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.
Really? People of any age will use whatever the group is using to talk with, because that's where the talk is happening. Most teenagers don't use Slack either, but will if the group notes say use this. There might be some "no one uses" argument because usage has dropped off almost everything since web searching got a lot better. There are fewer lingering people because most answers are readily available. Remember TLDP days? Search is so much better now.
We're not on about general IRC though, just for semi-private use where Slack would have been an IM tool.
> And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.
How is email not a real time chat platform? I see plenty of chat happening on mail lists, and I certainly can't out-type email delivery. Sure, mail sometimes needs a DNS lookup, sometimes has anti-virus/spam filtering too. Maybe that's better for public chat systems anyway.
Thinking more about it, I'd rather have maillists than a web/electron client.
I'm not on about using email for all IM (but it could be), I'm on about more useful messages that you'd want searched later. "Hey, I'm doing X on Y day, here's what you need to know", most of the time this sort of thing gets missed in a IM flood channel.
I don't see much difference between Slack/Teams etc and IRC or maillists, just the tools that existed before are much lighter and have so many more clients you can use the one you know already most of the time.
Not 14 years. Unlikely to be generations of execs.
"Slack" didn't do anything. A uninformed sales process included a customer it should not have, which was eventually resolved. Terms did end up changing, but for the better.
I'm willing to bet money that no one from the team or even area of the org chart that made that deal are still in that part of the org, or that any of them would have been involved in any situation that would have brought awareness of what was going on. Sales team have relatively high turnover, over like 25% anually. In my experience it's usually the least stable org chart in the company.
> Unlikely to be generations of execs.
There's probably been no less than ~6 executives that have been responsible for sales operations in that time frame, and that the sales process has been revamped and changes to how revenue is generated just as many times.
I didn't hit anyone! An uninformed hand, that was at that moment attached to my body, did!
Behavior "give me now 50K and then monthly 200K" is called Racketeering.
wikipedia > In the United States of America, racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit.
Did they offer new service and asked for more? No.
Did they came with new calculation based on costs? No.
They just insist on "more money or your operations are toast".
Once executives and vice- clout get into the court on racketeering, just like al Capone was, things will go much better.
I see accusations and statements, not questions and discovery. Folks seem too busy grabbing their pitchfork to engage in an honest conversation on shitty enterprise sales tactics.
People keep throwing out words like extortion and racketeering but clearly have zero idea what those words mean.
> Did they came with new calculation based on costs? No.
A regular review process flagged an account that it shouldn't have, and it was included in some low-level employees day-to-day. To try and act like this was some malicious planned attempt at extortion is an exhaustively stupid position to argue for, it has no legs other than to satisfy some dark urge.
It's a challenge to get a team of developers to adhere internal processes just affecting one team, imagine how hard it is to manage processes spanning managers, directors, and senior executives when those processes are a decade old.
It's absolutely naive to think the C-level executives of a company with 3,000 people are going to hear about an issue like this within 48 hours of it happening. But sure let's keep coming up with conspiracies to satisfy everyone's desire to virtue signal and show off how much they hate the cruel evil business.
Like someone who didn't know or a change that they were lumped into?
But on the plus side you provided an excellent lesson to these teens and I'm sure they will consider the importance of trust, leverage, and incentives when dealing with other companies in the future.
Go fuck yourself.
Undoubtedly the only mistake here was this getting attention. I'm sure hundreds of other groups have had the same experience Hack Club did.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
"This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:."
People should be welcomed and commended for posting like the GP, not shamed and hammered.
I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.
But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.
My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.
As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.
It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!
* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.
Fixing the immediate problem is only step one. It's reasonable to ask for accountability and that they tell us about what they're changing going forward.
From what I can tell the "tar-and-feather thing" is outrage directed at Slack and its CXOs, rather than the poor guy who happens to be reposting a message from the CPO.
Please don't let your moderator's concern for injury to individual people blind you to the fact that the outrage triggered by outrageous conduct is directed at the outrageous company and its officers, rather than at individual folks who aren't in a position with any real power.
I apologize for using your comment as a place to hang a whole generic thing about mobs and whatnot—I certainly didn't mean it about you personally (or even your post) - it's a shared group phenomenon for sure, and I could have made that clearer.
In my days of heading R&D for a regional social networking site, we discovered that first ~100k of our users were both the most valuable ones, due to the extent of their interaction with the site, and due to the fact that their risk tolerance for our /new/ product meant they would also tolerate future products. As such, that "first wave" of community around a product - is - the wave the creates the market for the product.
In case of Slack - they were taking that goodwill for granted. And the community's outrage called that bluff. It highlighted to other readers (like myself, I don't use Slack anymore so never paid attention to the ownership change) that it's now part of Salesforce (and that's a negative signal for me, might be positive for others); that it got pretty dubious business practices (as others in similar situation to OP have spoken up); and that none of the CXOs' committed to meaningful (from my and community's perspective) responses - post mortems; blast radius; accountability; data export.. which means either they don't have the power to make such commitments (wouldn't be the case pre-acquisition), or don't want to make them. Another negative signal.
Their envoy is out of the loop so when Hack Club tries to respond they are at best rejected as some spurned rouge customer, and at worst completely ignored as they fail to reach anyone who has the power to properly look into it. So they have to go nuclear and make things public just to get the attention of a billion dollar corporation.
The fix, if any of this speculation is accurate, is indeed cultural. One counter to the current culture of tech trying to lay off as much as they can and letting Customer Service rot on the wayside. These PR crises were long determined as an "acceptable risk" of such cuts.
I don't think our engineer quoting Rob upstream has anything directly to do with this (maybe Rob does, but that's too speculative even for this post), but I do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America. This is indeed endemic at multiple companies, not just Slack. I hear this is one of many reasons companies prefer to deal with Chinese companies; these kinds of CS slip ups just doesn't happen in their culture as regularly as the US.
In a culture of worshipping ARR you’ll need to put a price tag on everything you find shameful or it won’t happen.
I mean, objectively, unless it was an honest mistake, which we can generously assume because this is HN, this was a really cheap shot, worthy of Broadcom and friends.
The mechanism you talk about is all too real, and it can be semi-consciously exploited. A bit off-topic, but the way genocides happen is via a similar mechanism. A group is depicted as base, a disease, faults are attributed to it. It becomes a moral imperative to clean the body.
This feeling is thus rationalized, and people start to reinforce each other's conviction. It becomes a twisted status game: the more you lean into the mentality, the higher you rank. Often times the goal isn't even to "address" the original trigger, it's to show your peers your approval and distance yourself from "those people". They the immoral, we the moral.
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
Thank you!
This is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.
how do you know they're "showing up to fix something" and not simply servicing the "10% returns" end of a widespread scheme to shake down customers? This has every bit the look of "shake all the low-paying customers down as much as possible, if one of them manages to raise too much awareness, act like it was an isolated incident".
It matters a lot of this is an isolated incident or if this is par for the course; in the latter case, responding to those customers that were lucky enough to go viral is just part of the scheme proceeding as planned.
> We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I don't think we're going to get a different answer if we ask again, and frankly I wouldn't expect one.
2025 has told me that actions speak louder than words. I don't really see much engagement on trying to "relate to each other" on this platform lately. Not from the community nor those who moderate it. Just a facsimile of trying to maintain decorum in an age of chaos
----
Rant aside: a company isn't a person to relate to. They are made of people, but those people clearly make no attempt to relate either. This is a PR response, which despite having "relations" in it is not an attempt to engage with the community nor promote curiosity. So I will treat it as such.
Not saying it is right or wrong - just pointing out that people's patience is in short supply when it comes to mega corps, simply because of their very bad track records...
As an aside, there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by on the daily, usually the older the user somehow the more leeway there seems to be, so I'd suggest you focus your moderating attention on that.
Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.
Anything personal would have been appreciated, especially in this context. Maybe “I’m one of the thousands that work here but this means something to me…”?
Actually even a professional stance that showed concern: “One of our shared company values states…”
Sadly Jamie’s response didn’t build any trust of Slack from me…
It would have been better to first reach out to Slack and get a confirmation and document that. This way we would have evidence and Slack could not pull the oops card.
The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.
Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again.
Thanks for holding us accountable.
That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.
As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.
It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.
Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.
If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.
Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe.
Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion.
Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?
The real fallout from today may be hard to take account of.
I can't be the only one who saw this situation unfold and decided "I'll be certain to self-host if I ever set up something like this"
The damage to your brand is immense.
It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.
Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.
This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.
An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer:
However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said
that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and
$200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and
delete all of our message history.
The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.
The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.
This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.
Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?
Because it sure looks that way.
Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
For as much as it could be Slack's culture to hold hostage your data, it can also be a slightly reckless sales rep looking to strong arm to meet their aggressive targets to save their own job.
So Slack is large enough to not be able to identify "countless billing disputes", which is not what @casq identified as being the situation (note the direction of communication initiation):
Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are
going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all
message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000
USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus
additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive
ones)[0]
> Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
And what would be "the fix" had this interaction remained known only to a customer and Slack?
This all reads to me like dysfunction and incompetence rather than true malice.
> Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?
Yes just like the Sev B of Amazon where a customer could email [email protected] and rain pain onto people at Amazon. someone else in the large discussion said that from their own company's analysis for developer advocacy impact this kind of HN front page coverage is equivalent to an 8 figure marketing spend so I imagine this got escalated pretty damn fast.
You're right though that it is janky that the only way to be heard is to go public, but equally the negative PR has probably cost them much much more than the comparative peanuts they were hoping to make from this one account.
Wether that’s giving a serious punishment to one oversealous employee, or a light reprimand to everyone in a department, there has to be some action taken to regain credibility. (along with proof that such action was taken)
lol..... what a joke.
“We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.
This sort of declaration would have demonstrated Slack’s serious commitment to prevention. Each clause carries weight, it costs Slack nothing to provide it, and it prohibits Slack from entire categories of present and future abuses of this nature for all non-profit customers. The CEO’s commitment below does not rise to this bar, leaving the door open for further abuses, and maintaining price increases already extorted from other non-profit customers. Perhaps a future press release will close that gap.
An apology contains three components: acknowledgment of impact, declaration of whether the impact was intentional or accidental, and whether preventative steps will be taken; it also contains one contextual attribute: whether this specific impact has broad implications. The CEO’s apology meets these terms in the case of this specific customer only, without committing to review and reparation of the customer category “non-profit customers”. It is certain other non-profits were impacted, but their concerns are not in-scope for the CEO’s statements, which apologize for a single instance without declaring intent to review and correct others. Most readers would be correct in rejecting it as a relevant apology, however valid it may be for the one customer above.
I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.
Donation time - May I humbly suggest $195k. Accountability means there are no one way bets, when you stand to gain you stand to lose.
Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.
Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.
I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
Definitely like to judge folks based on how they fix (systemically!) problems. That said, did any kids in the club voice concerns about staying with an organization which had such a [potentially] severe incident?
Last year Salesforce launched Agentforce and gave everyone a free year. Dreamforce is coming up next month, I wonder how many companies are going to find themselves in a similar situation to yours...
While I don't use slack and am barely familiar with its functionality, this stuck out just as an example of how important it is to export and save backups of anything you do with a third-party platform that your business completely depends on. That by itself is dangerous but at least saving all those DMs and channel content would have been a good idea.
As far as I understand, there are apps that let you do this. 11 years is a lot to lose.
I hear mattermost is a good alternative and you can self host it.
Good luck, I’m sure teaching teens to code as a nonprofit is hard work enough, I can’t imagine worrying about losing 11 years worth of messsges on top of it.
Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)
For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: [email protected]