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
Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.
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.
Appreciated that you fixed the billing process issue. Are there any other non profits that are effected or it only this one?
Hell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days."
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?
What was the oversight? How did you correct it?
They won’t answer, because they’re not interested in actually being accountable.
The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).
I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.
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.
> "Thanks for holding us accountable."
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"
Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota
Thank you Denise! Christina (Hack Club cofounder)
FWIW, in case you are not familiar with this forum: a 2700 point story is kind of a big deal, on par with the announcement of GPT-5 (only ~2k points).
The damage to your brand is immense.
It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.
To quantify what I mean by "immense", as a former developer advocacy leader at a large public company, I once modeled HN impact and would estimate this story to be equivalent to a low-to-mid 8 figure marketing spend.
Now I’d love to know more about that model!
Did your model look at "positive impact from publicity of being mentioned on HN", or did it look at "revenue loss from negative story on HN"?
I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.
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.
Yup, I would’ve considered slack in the past but now I know I never will, considering the CEO’s apology provides no guarantees they’ll help any other client with this issue currently or in the future unless they also cause a media fallout, and no details or transparency on how this occurred.
This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.
> Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue ...
An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer:
> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.
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 is a giant company at this stage. Is it so impossible to see that countless billing disputes both valid, invalid and injust happen multiple times a day without ever reaching senior teams because they have entire departments for that.
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.
> Slack is a giant company at this stage.
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):
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?
> 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?
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280
> 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 deactivate the Hack Club 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 jeff@amazon.com 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.
Someone, or a group of someones, has to be responsible for sending a threat to close down a customers account. (assuming the customer is in fact acting in good faith, honourable, and so on)
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)
as a communications company they sure suck at it. sure there are countless billing disputes, but only backtracking because they got caught out? how many other disputes ended with their victims just paying because they didn't have enough exposure?
A junior rep would not or should not have the access or ability to make 50k+ usd demands of some of the biggest clients on file. This does not sound to me like a junior rep.
Or contrary to that they should not have the ability to delete user data... And make a threat about it.
You restored their pricing, and thats it? No gesture of goodwill to cover the cost they have borne being stressed and coming on here to post about it?
lol..... what a joke.
I don’t think many readers here will be taken in by this performative apology and believe it is anything other than it is:
“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.
Honest question: is there any apology that you would have accepted?
“We’ve committed in writing to indefinite maintenance of the non-profit discount terms at their current percentage to all non-profits, transferable only in the case of merging with another non-profit; to charging non-profits at a percentage of a base rate equal to our lowest base rate charged to any class of customers; and to providing two years of advance notice for base rate increases affecting our non-profit discounted customers.”
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.
Blackmail by mistake sorry!
This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.
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.
Wait - this is the same Denise Dresser that led led some uber-high-pressure Salesforce enterprise sales teams in 2010s? Something tells me you aren’t really sorry
> Thanks for holding us accountable.
Donation time - May I humbly suggest $195k. Accountability means there are no one way bets, when you stand to gain you stand to lose.
yeh that's BS. you pushed your management to improve their numbers regardless of your human clients, they did it and now you're blaming it on them as a mistake due to the bad PR.
I find it hard to believe such an underhanded policy was not approved by senior staff members. Clearly, the negative feedback has forced Slack to change course, but that such a policy was allowed in the first place will be held against Slack by any reasonable person for the foreseeable future.
Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:).
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:.
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
This. The fuckup sounds like it started on the Slack account team's end (or their sales leadership, if it was pushed from above), so that's where consequences should start.
Agreed, someone had to meet their 3rd quarter goal and threw a Hail Mary at Hack Club. Shameless.
Thanks, Rob, for owning up to it and doing something about it.
Feeling incredulous that this "mistake" ever would have been rectified had it not been for the public attention this is getting.
(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
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.)
:bow:
The great @dang has spoken.
How many other 'mistakes' are there though? How many others are being exploited but just foot the bill?
Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake.
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.
I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!
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.
Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.
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.
Yeah, I don't care about some non-profit or whatever. I care that the company thinks it's a-okay to demand from their customers 10x their yearly bill on the spot and to commit to 4x that yearly or else their data will be deleted in a few days. That's not an employee acting out of band, it's obviously their modus operandi.
Zach has posted separately about Hack Club continuing on Slack. In general, customers can export their data and the options for that by our various subscription plans are here: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp....
So if they want to export all of their data they might have to pay you more money to do so? How exactly does that seem fair when they don't agree to the existing price increase?
Good to know this!
No guarantees needed (and good on ya for this fix)!
Def do encourage the post mortem with root-cause analysis & robust corrective action plan. Thanks for being here.
Is that a good advert for Salesforce?
What I miss from these sort of apologies is an actual postmortem like the one we'd have for a software bug.
What was this oversight? What caused it? What are you exactly doing to prevent it from happening in the future?
> I cannot guarantee
You mean you won't guarantee. You could guarantee this if you invested in customer service. Choosing not to do so is a choice.
> an oversight in our billing process
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 now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.
> 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
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.
The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.
It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit.
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?
This is the new way of doing business. Rip off as much as you can until there is enough publicity around your bad behavior such that it may affect your bottom line.
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.
One look at his LinkedIn and all becomes clear lol.
Not new. Ever heard of Oracle? :)
He used to work there, hence my comment about linkedin lol.
Except that Oracle doesn't say sorry and doesn't appear to have any human connection at all, they don't even fake it.
Yeah, don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower folks
Funny you mention Oracle: Slack’s former SVP of NA sales just moved on to a CRO job elsewhere a few weeks back. Their early career? Sales @ Oracle! Really, can’t make this stuff up. I went looking to see who Slack’s CRO was given it was their product C-level here commenting instead of someone more relevant in charge of the operational area where this happened. I did not at all fall over in shock to see that the person who shepherded Slack’s sales tactics to a culture where this is even a possibility was previously associated with Oracle sales.
Slack has been a rip off from the absolute beginning really. It's good to see more examples like the OP on why to stop using them, there has never been a single one besides FOMO.
Are you describing PG&E?
>are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
No answer means this.
You're not going to hear back from @seamanrob. I guarantee it.
this era of trying to fly under the radar until you get called out on HN is a really great look
/s
:heart:
A few more heart emojis ought to make this go away.
Way to go Rob! Thanks for owning up to it. And for being persistent about correcting it.
Thank you for responding and taking this on.
> 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.
As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.
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.
I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.
yup, agreed. this is a super shady pressure tactic that should be shamed.
Let's be real, when an entity like Slack says "delete all your data," they actually mean they will add a flag in the database to make it inaccessible to those who aren't purchasing bulk data for data mining and llm training. The data will persist regardless.
So what exactly was the oversight here? Is it normal practice to change contracts and billing plans and threaten deactivation within 7 days?
Nah, this was one of those evil customer service reps who will do anything to make thier employer look bad. No corporation would ever leverage data custody to extract a quick balloon paymemt. Devilish customer service reps reading from false scripts are the real problem.
Can customer service reps take such big decisions on their own without some kind of oversight from the seniors?
"Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: ‘I need less heads’"
https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-ma...
Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.
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: )
A postmortem — software bug fix please. 1. Why did this happen? 2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this? 3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?
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.
@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.
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...
Can you comment on the other organizations who've had similar experiences recently?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287607 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
Move to other platforms? xD
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
"We used the wrong React hook which increased the billing rate of our customers. Sorry"
Ref: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/cloudflare_ddosed_its...
This is a joke right?
I doubt it
*This was a mistake on knowing this would blow up
> This was a mistake.
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.
lol a "mistake"
I definitely heard about another nonprofit group that got similarly punted last quarter, or maybe the quarter before... shame I can't remember it now.
Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
Great you are owning the mistake and fixing it.
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...
There is about as much ownership here as a squatter in a two-bedroom apartment. They are apologizing because they got caught, not because they genuinely believe they messed up.
Someone suggested the possibility that the org status change which moved them out of the "not for profit".
After this the billing department might just get a list of companies that are behind and start a process.
No, I’m pretty sure Slack was never a “not for profit” company. Most not-for-profits do not ambush their customers with $250k bills on a week’s notice. I’ve seen debt collectors less predatory than this.
I'm referring to Hack Club. Am I incorrect about the details related to not for profit?
zero owning of the mistake. calling it an 'oversight' with no real apologies is just a brush off
I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.
The community here is very forgiving of software bugs, but why did the rep act that way? To paraphrase Warren Buffet, what are the incentives that directed that led to this outcome? Why did the rep in this case act so viciously?
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.
> 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.
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.
Since everything is being fixed, does that mean that "Hack Club" is not going to move to mattermost after all?
Yep, we're not! (From a hc'er). Zach announced that slack has gifted us half a decade of enterprise+. Whilst slack's behaviour is worrying, it probably wouldn't make sense to cut all ties. Either way- another 5 years to migrate! :-)
> This was a mistake.
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.
Hi Rob, I'm Ian, CEO at Mattermost. Apologies for repeating the question from jrflowers, but I couldn't resist:
>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?
What a weird attempt at injecting your product marketing.
I was wondering about what options exist for Slack, and Mattermost along with a few others do seem to have a completely free layer.
Although transparently self-serving, this seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, this couldn't happen to you at Mattermost because we A) have a free tier, and B) allow you to export your data."
This is hacker news, hackers are ceos, too, and have a very relevant product or service to sell. If anything he didn’t do it enough in this thread.
cancelled our company's slack plan when all this news dropped. We're looking at Mattermost, the reviews are really good
How many others get this treatment without the publicity, y'all still showed your colors. Enjoy your business practices.
It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity.
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.
It isn't two weeks until end of quarter. Like many businesses, Salesforce's fiscal calendar runs Feb 1 to Jan 31. Slack's did, too, before the acquisition. Q3 ends on Oct 31.
The time to complete the paperwork on a $200k/yr deal is longer than 2 weeks. Especially if the customer is expected to fork over 4000% more than what they were paying.
B2B procurement in this range can take anywhere from a few days to a year, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the very specific and demonstrably false claim I was responding to.
Fair, it’s 6 weeks until the end of the quarter.
There’s still a human account manager involved, it wasn’t an automated billing error.
Exactly — anyone who has worked in sales for a New York minute knows that any six figures deal will have a human account manager assigned to it.
> This was a mistake.
This looks extremely deliberate to me. Are you seriously suggesting that one of your sales reps accidentally demanded $250k from a bunch of teenagers?
No I’m pretty sure they’re suggesting that the account got somehow flagged as a for profit account, and they consider that a mistake and are fixing it.
I think you don’t have to find the least charitable interpretation for what they’re saying. There can be something in the middle.
I can think of at least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one. Taking their word exactly at face value is not “something in the middle”.
> least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one
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.
I don't perceive this as virtue signalling, this is your own slightly uncharitable interpretation. People are responding to what they perceive as bullying in line with what looks like extremely heavy-handee sales tactics that do not seem uncommon.
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.
> don't perceive this as virtue signalling
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.
> It's the literal definition of virtue signaling
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.
Here's what I found for the definition - it perfectly captures 99% of the comments I'm reading.
"...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.
Oh yes, people could be more level-headed and write more level-headed comments instead of emotional knee-jerk ones. But you know what? In this thread, you are one of them.
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.
The fact of the matter is that Slack knew they were a nonprofit and made the deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking. This is honest engagement, and given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
> Slack knew they were a nonprofit
"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.
So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?
I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.
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.
Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).
There was a phone call, there was a human, this was not resolved until there was a public backlash.
>> 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)
> 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...
His response speaks volumes. Yours too.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
For whole chain of command up to CEO and board. That is least we should ask each and every time.
Will there be a publicly available post-mortem when the root cause has been identified?
Can you explain the nature of the mistake?
Like someone who didn't know or a change that they were lumped into?
This wasn't a mistake, you got caught.
It backfired badly, and now it was a mistake... Seems like posting it helped giving it some sort of resolution
No, this was a decision that had negative effects and it makes you look very, very bad.
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.
Exactly. This theatrical damage control behavior is every time same story. Mistake made by fault in our system or by intern which no longer works here. Not a greed at all.
I bet they'll just keep using slack, but we can dream.
we are still using slack
womp womp
You could start by explaining what exactly went wrong. Not doing that would be a mistake.
>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:.
Undoubtedly the only mistake here was this getting attention. I'm sure hundreds of other groups have had the same experience Hack Club did.
What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
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.
so you couldn't respond to your client but had enought time to make an account and post here because of the blowback?
Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.
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.
Thanks for keeping us posted, Christina!
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?
I'm a Hack Clubber! Alot of teenagers did voice concerns as this incident destroyed the trust in Slack and was honestly a wake up call
I'm surprised you aren't still going to move hosting. Now you have more time to do it carefully and not get burned again.
I would suggest emailing Benioff directly, an EA will screen the emails and route them to the appropriate person but I believe the charity angle might get it in front of him, and probably get the fee waived
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
Do you have his email address? Send it to christina@hackclub.com
I do but it’s also very easily googleable and exactly what you would imagine. Everyone in Salesforce is generally either flast or first.last (or both)
If you have a bunch of coders, just scrape the data. Then turn your back on this greedy maw.
We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
this is what we're doing :)
Mattermost adheres to the same tactics as Salesforce: group calls in v10 only with paid tiers whereas free before. Have you considered alternatives?
See discussions below in this HN thread.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fp76f0/matterm...
[1] https://forum.mattermost.com/t/solved-is-there-any-limitatio...
We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again
Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"
It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.
You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.
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.
For what it's worth, Zulip has a Mattermost data import tool, and communities are an important use case when we set product direction.
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)
Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P
Mattermost is great, we've used it at a few places and it's very flexible.
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.
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.
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.
Please do not include PDF and usable in one sentence. Setting up some simple Postgres with sonic for fuzzy search would be _usable_, but PDF is like migrating from Slack to Teams.
PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.
I agree, but I don't think they were using the PDFs programmatically.
In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.
We did the migration in stages, basically this:
In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.
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.).
> In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs
Or, they could not in some practical manner do searches on previous posts, so they didn’t use them?
Wait. You moved from slack to teams? Why? We are in the process of moving to slack from teams and I can’t phantom something worse than teams.
I didn't make the decision, the company I worked for did. I was asked to come up with a way to help make the process smooth.
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
As a product, I like Slack a lot more than teams. Chatting is easier, the apps are better, reminders and scheduled messages, workflows, etc. Threaded conversations are much easier as well, and aren't artificially restricted to certain types of channels.
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.
Not for long, at least for the EU and I assume for us in the EEA. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Does that break DM’s privacy or does it only let you export your own DM’s?
Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.
Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.
So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).
IIRC, you have to do something called a "compliance export," which just like any other compliance feature (SSO, HIPAA BAA, audit logs, etc.) usually requires the highest plan. It's designed to add some extra friction so admins can't just add themselves to a DM from the main UI like they could with a channel, but it is possible.
If you think anything you do on your work computer or saas accounts is private I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
why the extra step of making them into PDFs?
Human readable format at rest, I assume.
PDF is definitely not a human-reable format.
In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...
I think you don't understand what "human-readable format" means. The Wikipedia article has a good overview[1]. Open any PDF in a text editor instead of a PDF viewer and you'll see why it's not a human-readable format.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-readable_medium_and_data
We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.
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.
I'd bake them into a Sphinx static site. That gives you a free client side search index along with better navigability than sheets of paper. And you can target PDF if you still want it.
Yeah, my first thought was Mattermost, it’s pretty straightforward to set up and then your data’s nobody’s hostage.
Zulip is awesome too. On prem.
What do you like about Zulip? Any drawbacks that you tolerate? Considering it for on-prem but would love to have some real-world feedback.
Used it for about 2 years at a growing startup. What I liked:
* 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.
If you try to use the Slack APIs to scrape the data you will *quickly* run face-first into the insanely restrictive rate limiting they recently enacted to combat their customers using AI tools they aren't providing and able to monetize.
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
(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman):
"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:."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980
When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.
Moreover, relying on social media visibility to decide which mistakes get corrected and which don't is a really terrible system, whether intentional or unintentional, and I really don't like supporting companies where that becomes the case. At least in part because I'm not really the type to make the fuss; I'd rather just avoid the risk in the first place.
Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something. I'm sure you didn't mean to (at least I hope not) but it's one of the nastiest effects a community like this one can have.
People should be welcomed and commended for posting like the GP, not shamed and hammered.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Slack obviously didn't care about the problem until it started causing them PR issues, now that they're doing the standard Social Media corporate damage control we have to hold any criticism of the issue and their response? How many other clients have they done this to that haven't gone gone public or created a PR problem for $27bn Slack?
The question is at what point the community response stops being beneficial and starts being harmful to the community itself.
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.
I think there's a reasonable question about whether this was really an accident or something deliberate that they walked away from after bad PR.
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.
I don't know about "accountability" - that word tends to get weaponized, and I'm not sure who is accountable to internet commenters or why we internet commenters feel they are accountable to us. But of course it's fine to ask what happened, what will be changed, etc. That's orthogonal to the rage thing though.
Well, e.g. I am at a nonprofit using Slack and would rather not get rugpulled in the future. So I'm particularly interested in any evidence that Slack can give that this was an isolated, unintentional circumstance and won't happen again.
Absolutely, and I see nothing wrong with that at all. My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.
> My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.
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.
Sorry but I can't agree with this framing. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293818.
I don't see how my comment above could be interpreted as any sort of personal attack or tar-and-feather behavior towards the person I replied to. This is a discussion about a bad business practice at a major company, and that is what these concerns are voiced against, not any one individual person who is acting as a spokesperson.
I interpreted it that way based on lots of past experience with the dynamic I wrote about upthread. I believe you that you didn't intend it to come across as hostile! The problem is that intent doesn't communicate itself, especially in short critical comments. The way I usually put it is "the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
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.
As an internet commenter, I expect vendors to be accountable to us precisely because we provide them free marketing in exchange for, well, attention of us, and our fellow commenters and readers.
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.
I use hanlon's razor here. Or perhaps a Bus Factor. Someone envoying for this situation got laid off or left, there wasn't proper documentation to track the issue, someone else picked up a warning in their feed and they launched out an email as they'd normally do, without reading into the context of the situation.
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.
> do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America
In a culture of worshipping ARR you’ll need to put a price tag on everything you find shameful or it won’t happen.
HN moderation is routinely put in front of the most interesting dilemmas! Your response is, of course, sensible. Let's hope that if Slack does something similar to another non-profit, then it will rise again on the top of the front page, so that it doesn't end up being a story of "I got my free pass because I was lucky enough that the press talked about me", when others get a similar treatment, without the deserved PR nightmare that comes with it.
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 job isn't finished if a complaint has to go viral every time slack has an oversight and threatens to delete nonprofit chat data within 7 days. The comment you're calling unprocessed rage and tar-and-feathering just said it's more than a simple mistake. If anything your comments have been harsher to individuals.
Yeah I see how I could have given that impression, now that you say it. We do try to be careful not to single out or pile on specific users, but there's always more to learn about that.
Wow one of the most insightful takes I've read in a long time, hidden in the depths of a HN thread.
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.
@dang I trust you are writing or will eventually write a book about your time here and what you’ve taken from it. I hope I hear about it!
Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.
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!
Sure! you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll do my best. Specific questions are easier to answer than general ones :)
> the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage... 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 is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.
> Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something.
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.
I don't know, of course. What I do know is the effect of repeatedly assuming the worst about other people and pounding them with unprocessed rage, which is what internet indignation is all about. The effect is that it poisons community. Since we want a good community, we should avoid doing that here.
They are not "other people", they are company offering services.
Every HN user is a person regardless of where they work, and everyone here is posting first as a human being, same as you and I are. That's how we all need to relate to each other. Work affiliations don't obviate that, and there's no substantive point or question that can't be posted this way.
I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3
About being used to pressure companies, but not TOO much so they keep pushing that button?
About learning to relate to each other better. Doesn't that sound ok?
I'm pretty tired of things "sounding" okay. That was in 2024.
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.
I dont know that we should assume the worst but you are assuming the best, that's what irks me more here. my position is that we should be skeptical and demand (politely, civilly, that is all fine) more information about what is the nature of this mistake, why did it happen, and what do we know about the same mistake happening elsewhere? the parent post was just "this is a mistake, we're fixing it, giggles", I would argue that's insufficient.
I agree that we shouldn’t pile on and assume the worst. However, multiple comments have asked what Slack will do to ensure this doesn’t happen again, which is important pressure to put on the corporation so that they can show (and not just tell us) that they truly are committed to fixing this problem.
This was their answer to that question:
> 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.
Yes, and that's the frustrating part of it all. I'm tired of turning the other cheek for companies that are ransacking us financially and exhausting us emotionally. It shouldn't take a public drama for a business to be proressional. Clearly leaving it as "we'll fix it, oppsie" isn't far enough.
I suppose people get automatically annoyed because who the owner of Slack is. It is reasonable to assume bad practices if the company is too large to care, have multiple prior bad incidents etc - that is why people automatically assume guilt with companies like Oracle, Comcast, Salesforce etc etc. If the company in question was a small 50 person outfit or unknown, people might assume it was an honest mistake or at least give benefit of the doubt.
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...
Yes. No argument here about that.
It's not your place to attempt to moderate perfectly reasonable posts just because the overall "feel" of the conversation seems off to you. The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.
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.
The mods' job is to prevent the community system from falling into its failure modes, and/or to jig it out of them when it does (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In that sense, posting like I did there is very much our place. (Not personally, of course, but in the role.) Whether I pulled it off well or not is a separate question.
> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by
I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to see it all, let alone read it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
> The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.
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.
But staff showing up and simply quoting a person higher in the org only shows they’re parroting.
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…
Here's the thing: the post says it was written in haste so I imagine they wrote it before they spoke to anyone at Slack. There is no way to verify malice.
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.
counterpoint: in software mistakes at scale is sorta what we do
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
They're shaking everyone down, it's been going on for years. They want huge sums of money to maintain chat history. I'm watching orgs left and right move to teams, not because it's better in anyway, but because it's basically free.
"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."
The OA who wrote the Web page that we are discussing has nailed this I think. They will go far.
i posted a comment saying as much but deleted it. I had a client 8-9 years ago where Salesforce showed up with a bill in the millions and said "pay up or your org/instance and all your data is gone". "Shakedown" is exactly how the client described it.
Salesforce is in the business of forcing sales.
I see what you did there. Upvoted for something or other.
Isn't changing the terms of a deal without even sending you a new contract pretty much illegal anywhere sane? Even between business entities?
We don't know (but the norm is) if the original contract had a sunset clause.
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.
> 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.
The special rate was charity.
If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?
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.
> If a special rate that better fits an organization's usage patterns is "charity", then any rate that is not extracting the maximum amount of money from the customer is also "charity", no?
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.
> it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."
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)
No one is ever going to pay per-seat for tens of thousands of teenage volunteers. If you're an unusual customer (nonprofit, with lots of volunteers and program people in the slack) you might end up with a long term special deal recognizing those circumstances (charging you for employees but not others).
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.
Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
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.
> Saying that only the 50 workers need to pay $100 a year, and not all the program participants, is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to pay for a chat server.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, that is correct.
> I am constantly surprised by the number of people with "manager " in their title who don't know how to read a legal document.
Well, that's what you have lawyers for.
Otherwise, agreed with your comment.
You have a lawyer to warn you about things you might not notice in your contract. But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.
> But to not know your general payment terms comes off as pretty lazy.
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!
No, you don't. You have lawyers to assist managers in legal matters. But you can't simply throw a contract at a lawyer and ask "What do you think?" All the terms need to be understood by the manager. It is however reasonable to ask a lawyer "What does this say in normal language?" and "Is there any provision in this thing that sticks out as being really out of line or would trip us up if we had to litigate it?" Understanding a contract is not difficult. I've negotiated contracts with some of the largest companies in the world over my career and it only worked because I was also reading the contracts and interacting with the lawyer as a partner.
In EU a vendor can amend a contract but it gives the client the opportunity to breach that contract without consequences.
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.
Well, you can amend a contract, but you need to send the new conditions, and it gives the other party option of not accepting the new contract, which means either amending party needs to accept continuation under old contract, or dissolution of the contractual relationship with no fees/damages/etc for the party that didn't accept new contract.
The part that I find egregious is that apparently Slack didn't even send a new contract.
> but they are free to walk away and pay nothing.
not so for a service which holds your data hostage (unless 'walking away' means you're also able to walk away with your data).
That's an interesting topic that someone should sic some lawyers on, tbqh.
You need to be able and willing to fight the other party in court. I doubt anyone there is enthusiastic about that.
Depends on what you want to fight about.
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.
The terms of the deal almost certainly specified they are allowed to change terms at their discretion in the future
"We can change the terms at our discretion" is a line that gets the book thrown at you in court, at least in EU, and that's the start of the humiliation conga for whoever tries to claim such a clause.
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 just explained why EU software startups do not cause VCs to rain money down on them.
I've seen a lot of bad takes about this topic, but "there's no VCs because you can't ransom your clients for extra money" is... out there, special extra.
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.
I have a key for https://once.com/campfire by 37Signals.com, which is an alternative to Slack, that I could offer in-kind to Hack Club - if desired.
It's open source and you own your own data.
It's free now, they released it for free in most recent Railsconf.
So you know - campfire is now open source.
https://x.com/dhh/status/1963675999012552970
Sad to hear this, I heard of this extortionist behavior with Heroku before but Slack is unprecedented.
Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.
Unprecedented? From this company? Are you serious?
First time I heard this kind of thing for Slack, Heroku got instances before. I know both are owned by Salesforce, just want to make things clear.
You mean a chat company that raise $1.3 billion (!!!) and got bought for nearly $28 billion (!!!) is acting greedy?
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.
Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce. If they do it with one of their businesses you should expect it with the others.
> 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.
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...
This makes me sad, maybe the next hackathon should be to engineer a scraper/RPA frankenmonster that scrolls through all slack history one page at a time, scrapes/screenshots all conversations and port them to another piece of software.
Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
>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
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.
is slack legally allowed to not let you export your data in order to move somewhere else?
Everything that is not forbidden by the law is allowed. Is there a law specifically granting you the right to data held by another? Can my electric company legally withhold hourly usage data of mine even though they have it?
GDPR (and similar laws, like CCPA) require companies to provide a data export when requested. Probably this could be used here?
If every user did a gdpr request perhaps
I know GDPR provides rights for access and portability, but I'm not sure if you have portability rights for content you didn't create (like messages sent to you).
Why not? It is data about you, technically speaking.
Have you talked to a rep from Mattermost or Zulip yet?
I saw the post title and immediately thought of you guys - really scary situation! Very happy to hear that Slack reached out with a solution.
Consider an XMPP server. Make it a Hack Club project. Never tether to BigCorp if you're flexible enough to DIY.
That's hard on a fast deadline.
maybe an opportunity in crisis: move to Zulip, and self-host it.
Hi, this is meant to be a friendly question so apologies if it comes out wrong. Why does Hack Club coordinate over Slack? Wouldn't a free platform such as Matrix, Jabber or IRC be more in the spirit of an educational environment? Also, as I see it, wouldn't it be cheaper?
they essentially tried to blackmail you into paying ASAP. while they tried to put it right because they got exposed I hope you continue with making plans for migration in the background.
yall should look into migrating away from Slack after this incident even though they "fixed" the billing issue.
Glad it got resolved, if this isn’t an excellent reason to get off slack and a perfect illustration sd to why owning your data matters then I don’t know what is.
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.
Why not switch to zulip/mattermost?
This is very well explained in the linked post.
Can you quote it? From what I can gather the linked post doesn't mention Zulip
Zulip no (which has its own issues from what I read) but they are migrating to mattermost:
> 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.
“For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate”
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?
> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack
Is there not the option to go back to the free version with 90 days of history?
Then they lose their 11 years of history
Probably worth it and possibly a great lesson for others.
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 think the lesson is more to not to pay for ephemeral chat. If Slack will let you chat for free with 90 days history, don't get sucked into the paid version if you can at all avoid it.
Yeah this. Do not pay for something that is absolutely integral to your operations, when viable alternatives exist.
The data and searchability is slacks main selling point. A lot of people don't get that.
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".
> The free 90 day version is worthless IMO
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.
But they said their instance would be deactivated which is what I'm asking about.
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.
Happy to help, did you consider https://getstream.io/chat/ ?
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.
I’ve not heard of getstream. Is your service open source and all data easily extracted?
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.
we power chat for over 1b users. you are very likely using our chat (strava, nextdoor, match, adobe, patreon, and many others)
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.