There is no obligation to provide the "grandfathered" free plan forever, they could have taken that away too. Presumably they switched to get some features they wanted that weren't on their old plan. Slack can take away the old deal as easy as the new, staying on the old is no guarantee Slack will let you keep it forever.
Right - there is so much context missing. Extrapolating just a little, it looks like the story is something more like "We had too many users for our existing free plan, so we switched to a paid plan that had a first-year discount of 97%. We didn't really pay attention to the fine print, and now we've got a nasty letter demanding lots of money."
Not defending Slack / Salesforce. You just can't deal with them with that level of naivety.
i don't know if your surmises are correct. But my point is just that this seems irrelevant to Slack ending the deal. If they had stayed on the existing "grandfathered" plan, Slack could still be ending it. So I don't see the relevance. There's no reason to think they would be safer if they had stayed on a "grandfathered" plan that isn't even offered anymore, in fact it's often safer to switch to a currently offered plan if they're offering you a reasonable one, figuring they'll end the grandfathered one sooner than a currently offered one. That alone could be reason to switch in fact.
Right. The sensible thing to do would have been to develop a migration strategy as soon as you hear words like "grandfathered" or "first-year discount".
Skyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.
No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).
I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.
Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.
> 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
From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.
"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go very sideways.
It wasn’t slack, but I’ve had multiple vendors that I was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8 business days before the renewal was due.
Both times I’ve paid the new price for 1 year and cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next year when we didn’t renew.
In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment on this post).
I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue crash into a wall and then complaining online about it doesn't help anyone.
I get that regardless there were warning signs, but it honestly seems like slack either miscommunicated or flat out lied to them about the ability to address pricing. While in retrospect they should have started preparing to migrate away, it's human nature to assume good intentions and hope that things will work out well.
There's a couple of interpretations here.
1. The sales rep really thought they would be able to retain good pricing for them and it fell through, and at the last minute hackclub was blindsided by their inability to retain the pricing.
2. The sales rep thought that hackclub was likely to jump ship if they had time to plan based on the new pricing, and lied to them about the possibility of retaining pricing. And thought that by doing so they could force at least one year of higher cost.
3. Hack Club is misrepresenting their communications with Slack to drum up public approval.
My guess is that option 1 is the most likely, and the optimism of the sales rep ended up being a net negative, and human nature being what it is, Hack Club thought things would work out, and everyone is already busy so why borrow trouble.
As for complaining online, sadly it seems that bad press is the only lever that most people have as a forcing factor for companies these days. I honestly only had a Twitter account for a long time, just so I could complain about companies in public to get them to do the right thing, so unfortunately complaining online does actually help.
>A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community.
>However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
>One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more.
This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
Reading between the lines in the top comment on this link, they received a bill earlier this year, and have been in communication with Slack since then.
The transition away from Slack's nonprofit pricing is also a key element to this story, but that is glossed over.
No - it's very clear that the people involved know details that we do not, and are withholding them for the sake of a better story. I have an axe to grind against people who use technical platforms to air mismanaged and misrepresented grievances.
It’s very clear when you don’t read their comments and then make stuff up. Try not reading between the lines and just read the lines where they say stuff like we were told to ignore the bill as late as Aug 29 and we were sent no new contract or price change notices.
> We scanned 1338 dependencies and found 94 problems.
Just what I want in my terminal app.
I don't like the endless "security audit" noise, but there are 13 critical issues, some dating back 4 years, and including cryptogrpahy-related flaws (and that's just the top-level yarn.lock).
I think there's kind of a local minimum where you need to be farther from the propane explosion, but after your outside the blast radius you're fine, but less so for the lithium fire
Compressed hydrogen is no joke. It can escape most containers, actively degrades many grades of steel, has a very low ignition energy, and will explode over an enormous range of air/fuel ratios. Definitely not something to keep anywhere where you care about the roof :)
