Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase
147 comments
·September 18, 2025wpm
BrenBarn
It's not just cloud SaaS apps, it's everything that is based on unbounded transactions. Every subscription-model service, every Uber-like service, every social media site, every "free" email provider, everything. If you have to pay more than once for the same thing you're at risk.
It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
blackoil
Data export should be legally mandated, be it cloud or hosted solution.
trhway
Don't subscribe to the solutions without data export. And cron the daily export of your data from the solutions you're subscribed to (and better choose the providers with CDC capability). Pure situation of voting with your dollar.
Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
Fernicia
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
onetimeusename
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange.
It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
gxs
As someone who leads and has led large organizations in the past, I can tell you that believe it or not, users across different companies talk to each other and tell each other about the shitty software they are forced to use
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
calvinmorrison
"we want something that is standard".
Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.
Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
ant6n
We use Microsoft at our startup because it’s so cheap - 12$ for storage, chat, Video Call, Office, email.
Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025, MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery still doesn’t work reliably.
leoh
It's a very bad look. I think even the large cloud players often cut deals with pro-social firms and it's very pathetic that Slack doesn't. It's not like its particularly expensive to run n+1 infrastructure.
randyrand
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?
userbinator
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
edoceo
Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive.
I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
coder543
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
smelendez
Makes some sense to me.
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
ejstronge
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations.
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
notpushkin
Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
smelendez
And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
null
artursapek
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
Kirth
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?
joshstrange
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
JambalayaJimbo
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
mitthrowaway2
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
dzhiurgis
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
kragen
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.
layman51
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...
kfogel
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.
robotburrito
I love Zulip. We used it before our small firm was purchased by a large company that moved us to teams. Great software!
amarant
Unless I'm missing something tho, zulip seems to be exactly the same? That is, it's a SaaS with no oss software, no self hostable alternative. Only difference is they haven't hiked their prices......yet.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too
sweettea
It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
amarant
Oh, so I was missing something!
That was not very obvious from their landing page!
Well in that case, carry on!
Kirth
Sadly as with many such products, if you want SSO and the like, you'll still end up paying per user per month. That gets stupid expensive quick
dathinab
go to product > self-hosting
you might notice it's 100% free software
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
jakelazaroff
Looks like it uses the Apache license: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/
burkaman
It is open source and you can self host it.
flunhat
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.
tomrod
I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.
fn-mote
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....
(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.)
aramsh
This feels weirdly one-sided.
Hack Club helps fiscally sponsors organizations, who do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for HCB, lawyer fees and other stuff. Also, why is it a rug pull?
armada651
> 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.
syntaxing
To a person yes. To a business, not so much. It’s just the “cost of business”. A ton of hardware software is north of 10K for barebones license. Really adds up if you start stacking stuff (looking at you Catia and COMSOL).
andrewstuart2
It's not distorted so much as it is relative to value. But that's not for tech, it's just for business in general. If you can make an extra $500k because you spend $250k, and there's not a better way to spend that money, then it makes sense to spend the money as long as you can afford it (or borrow it).
armada651
I'm not saying that you shouldn't spend such a large sum when it makes sense and I'm definitely not saying that a distorted perception of money is limited to tech.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
amarant
Everything is relative.
My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10 million.
$250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that lost in their couch.
Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt
fn-mote
The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You can call it distortion if you want.
I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.
Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.
stouset
> value of money is quite absolute
You are conflating price and the value. I assure you that to a billionaire, $250,000 is of nearly no value at all.
realityfactchex
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.comnovatea
I'm in Hack Club, the team is moving all of us to self-hosted Mattermost. It is unfortunate that we have to re-code so many things though.
renewiltord
The post says they're moving to Mattermost and has a screenshot of the same.
junar
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?
sadeshmukh
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
3eb7988a1663
Are there details that would make it suddenly math for you? Getting a $50k bill out of the blue with one week to pay is an organizational failure / bully negotiating tactic.
junar
What I'm trying to say is that a story with more details is more interesting to me than a story with fewer ones.
They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
edoceo
My teams have been on MM for 5+ years. Self hosted. So, worst case we're reading directly from the PG database.
jppope
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.
nextworddev
First time hearing about Mattermost. Good thing I found this articl
murukesh_s
We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack
getpokedagain
So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency
dinkleberg
You can self-host Mattermost. It seems that is likely what they are going to be doing from the article since they talked about how important it is to own your data.
3eb7988a1663
It always felt weird to me that glorified IRC could command such a price premium. Admittedly, a bunch of engineering was put in place to make things work, but it was still just humans chatting with each other for what is probably tiny amounts of data storage.
twarge
We used Mattermost but eventually started getting annoyed by the nags to upgrade in the free version. Zulip is has been far better.
bigtones
Mattermost website is down right now with an nginx error. Does not look promising.
null
usef-
Seems fine to me. Maybe a regional blip? (you posted <1min ago)
privatelypublic
Off topic, but this reminds me of apples worst UI sin in my book: holding the refresh circle bo longer dumps the cache foe the page.
boxed
We ran Mattermost at a previous job and it was the best tool I've used for corporate use. It had an extremely useful feature where you could put a flag on a message and that flag was shared for everyone. We used it to keep track of which questions were answered in the suppor channel. With their API I plugged this into an internal tool so all developers could see how many open questions there was.
Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
squigz
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
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.