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Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29

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: christina@hackclub.com

Slack has been a down hill project for the past 5 years and has become incredibly bad.

Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.

When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.

Hey! I have an open-source project for browsing an exported slack archive, it may be useful to you so you can see and search the history: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser

I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)

A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend

I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....

https://hackclub.com/

(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)

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

> Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack

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

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.

Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].

Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?

Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.

  [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) 
  [1] https://zulip.com

+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.

Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...

Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups.

You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.

When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.

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

Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need).

All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.

This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.

Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack. We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc. Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.

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

As a member of the hack club slack, to update you all, we have been backing up absolutely everything and going as quick as we can

We're using teams in my new company, which is awful for textual communication (lacks threads in chats, groups are more like old forums than new IM). I've been experimenting with self-hosted Mattermost but it seems that it also requires paid license in some situations (e.g. does not have groups for some reason in the free version).

I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?

I really wish this post had more details.

How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing?

If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?

There are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0]. One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why.

Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...

We are using a hosted Zulip instance for company chats at Kagi, not just to prevent scenarios like this but also for data privacy reasons.

Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)

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

To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.

The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.

I have worked with an NFP who worked with Mattermost and they were very responsive as backend support.

I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.

IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available.

I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).

A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.

[1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai

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

Personally, I and my friends self host matrix for our organization but Mattermost is also a fine free-software alternative.

There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman <https://stallman.org/slack.html>

For those of you recommending matrix, have you tried in earnest to use it? I couldn't get reliable video and call to work, even with stun/turn servers properly configured (chrome doesn't trust let's encrypt for ICE certs, that was a fun one to debug, had to go with zerossl).

Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.

The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open.

For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile

Nobody should pay more than $195 for a chat app per year for unlimited usage. Completely insane pricing.

Take care about how you plan infrastructure.

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

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

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

The cloud is other people's computers.

Honestly, I did not know Salesforce had bought Slack. I would encourage everyone here to avoid that company - their business model seems to be create a spiderweb of critical touch points within an organisation and its data then suddenly hike prices. Certainly in this case but I’ve heard it happen with other products too.

So many stories like this about Slack.

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

That’s salesforce for you! My employer left slack due to 7 figure bill for seats that were 10 times smaller due to shrinking company.

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

What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.

I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.

If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.

What "years of institutional knowledge" does Hack Club and others have in Slack? I assume anything more than a week old to be unsearchable. In fact I want chats older than 1 week to be deleted so inportant stuff will be copied to wiki.

Sad to read, but I also got inspiring.

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

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

I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.

It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.

Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.

Why does skyfall.dev block Nigeria?

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

It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own shit for $5 a month, FFS!

I genuinely don't understand this from a business perspective. They were getting money, then they jacked up the price to a degree that all but guarantees they will lose them as a customer. Sure it's small potatoes but they could have done like 30 seconds of research to see if the customer even has the means to pay before strong-arming them and getting nothing.

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

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

Slack doesn't even have a functional input field.

Note that Mattermost is fake open source cosplay, and keeps important features in their non-foss application. If you want these table stakes features (like SSO or message expiry) you’ll find yourself maintaining your own fork or janky scaffolding (I have cronjobs that run SQL directly against the db).

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

It’s still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.

I’m not familiar with this organization. For those curious: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...

In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.

> a pretty massive sum of money

I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.

Time to switch to Mattermost.

Looks like we're moving to Mattermost!

Pretty amazing considering slack is just irc

this is bad

but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway

developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one

it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange

i wish discord worked better for work

Man, screw slack. WebKit also runs (ran?) on slack and because no one has been willing to foot the bill, search is significantly truncated. I tried reaching out to their sales team and several individuals there to see if they could do something to help -- after all, for crying out loud, WebKit is sine qua non for Slack and all I got was nonsense.

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

PSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:

"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."

So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

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

Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers!

https://www.discourse.org/

https://flarum.org/

https://www.simplemachines.org/

Can obe simply export all the data and dump that in Dropbox (for interim).

Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no lost data that way.

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

This is remarkably familiar.

We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.

It's Salesforce...

This is why I use open source or buy services based more on the company than the product itself... Not a fan of rug-pulls...

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

There must be some kind of mistake, or some details getting left out here. Usually Salesforce (the parent company) is pretty nice about offering discounts to nonprofits. If they are losing the discount, could it be that maybe it's because the clients they serve (i.e. the people receiving help/services at their nonprofit) are treated as "active members" of their Slack instance?

I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.

[0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...

[1]: https://slack.com/pricing/pro

expensive IRC with history

> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable

Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.

Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.

For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.

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

Slack is such a bloated, slow, piece of crap, every single keystroke gives me pain, that sluggish slow UI response, sometimes there are random unexplained jumps somewhere, no wonder web apps have such a bad reputation. My company forces us to use it, and it is sooo bad.

Welcome to Microsoft Teams

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

Bring back IRC lol

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

Edit: OK, message received! Thanks everyone for the feedback. We're turned off the downweights and will keep this on the front page.

==

The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.

I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.

According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.

I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.

But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.

[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...

[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...

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

Make your own Slack?

I pity companies using Slack. Once again, you don't need to be "cutting edge" all the time. You existed before Slack; you can continue existing after it. Let this be a valuable business lesson. Own your own stuff.

It's also not a coincidence that Slack is neutering the ability to access channel history via the API very soon. With a very generous rate limit of 2 requests per minute I believe it was and a max of ~10 messages. This is already enforced for new marketplace apps and will apply to all apps starting in March according to their docs.

We're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't lose it (Google drive mainly).

And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.

Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.

we built a tool on slack for communities and companies, and then did some outreach to community leaders about trying it out. they almost universally said that they hated being captive to slack and wanted to transition away.

Do not use Slack.

Unpopular opinion: I think it's wild that ANY ORG would pay $200k for a chat app. If I ever ran an org that needed a chat app and the costs came even close to $200k a year, I would rather hire an engineer, contract a designer, and create our own, or more likely, contribute/fork an open source project like Matrix; providing us with the ability to *really* integrate it into our company/tools - as oppose spending it on IRC+ for "good enough" integration. PLUS ... our data stays on under our control.

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

If you are going the way to self-host it so you own all your won data. all you have to do is run mattermost in production on hardware you control at 99.9% Or 80% or whatever uptime is deemed necessary.

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

The fact they think they can charge this much tells me that there is a lot of room for competition in the webguis for irc space.

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

That’s not what extortion means.

On the one hand I feel sorry about how big of a price hike that is but on the other, I call bs. I find it too hard to believe there was truly zero communication leading up to this point where you now have 1 week to pay up before they revoke all access and delete all data.

We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.

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

TLDR "we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too."