Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.
I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
And wasn’t the free version made kind of unusable through very limited retention like a decade ago?
If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad
We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.
At this point anyone looking to avoid a price hike like the one described above should probably consider something they'll have more control over.
I'd probably go with my own Mastodon server if I was a company that needed any such communication tool. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there too
That was not very obvious from their landing page!
Well in that case, carry on!
It says in bold letters:
"Your data is yours!
For ultimate control and compliance, self-host Zulip’s 100% open-source software"
> When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as our Zulip Cloud customers.
> Unlike the competition, you don't pay for SAML authentication, LDAP sync, or advanced roles and permissions. There is no “open core” catch — just freely available world-class software.
The optional pricing plans for self-hosted mention that you are buying email and chat support for SAML and other features, but I don't see where they're charging for access to SAML on self-hosted Zulip.
you might notice it's 100% free software
now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever
but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool
and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later
It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.
Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.
It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.
Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.
Except the software is often pretty annoying. And even in 2025, MS will still randomly eat random files and the auto recovery still doesn’t work reliably.
its not the amazing stack when i worked at $startup, but also we dont really spend any time futzing with it.
Microsoft releases a new feature, we get it. cool.
Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools
Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that
It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression
Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them
I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools
All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example
Enterprise software—software bought by people who don't have to use it—is as a rule abysmal. My model of how this happens is that there are large barriers to entry, and actually working well is not one of them, because the guy signing the PO doesn't have visibility into whether they work well or not. I don't know what the barriers are, but I suspect they include hiring people who already know CTOs, bribing ignorant shills like the Gartner Group, and having a convincing appear you'll still be in business in 10 years.
Most companies can disable data exports at any time. Even if you’re regularly backing up that data when they disable it you need to instantly move to a new service or there’s going to be a gap.
Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.
It's certainly true that some providers are worse than others, but I don't think any of them are "safe" in the long term. Self-hosting is one solution, but even apart from that, a competitive market of multiple providers makes rugpulls like this less likely, because in such an environment even people who are not directly screwed may decide to jump ship to avoid being screwed later.
Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.
You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.
Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).
But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.
If the company charged 10% of X for some time to prove the value (or “lock you in” if you prefer), then great, you got a subsidized ride for some time.
I do think platforms should offer data export, and I think customers should demand it, and I am open to the law requiring it.
But ultimately I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “suddenly this tool I assumed would be underpriced forever actually wants to charge what I think it’s worth” position.
I know, unpopular opinion, roast away. Or tell me why any company should assume its suppliers will never exercise their leverage and take that consumer surplus right back.
Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)
The reality no one wants to admit - most software companies have no moat whatsoever if they aren’t allowed to be anti competitive.
Think of it, this example alone is a $250k risk and it seems from this point forward that $250k risk is significantly high and the impact is major, considering there’s a short decision fuse on the extortion.
Would you be ready to retain data; set up, deploy, transition, restore, and scale alternatives to Slack within a week or your institution be forced to pay such blackmail/extortion?
> Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, reducing staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees · CEO Marc Benioff linked layoffs to AI automating...
I feel like the perception of money is distorted in tech circles. To me $10,000 is a pretty massive sum of money. For most people $250,000 represents a life-changing amount of money.
However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.
My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10 million.
$250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that lost in their couch.
Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt
You are conflating price and the value. I assure you that to a billionaire, $250,000 is of nearly no value at all.
Everything is relative.
I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.
Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.
For 99.9% of nonprofits, their annual budgets are in the single digit thousands or less. A sudden $250k bill is fatal.
Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
$50k today + no more business vs 10 yearsx$5k business
If you really need to juice the quarterly numbers, it is a strategy
How was the price computed? If Slack charging per user, how did this organization have so many users? Why is their new provider more favorable in pricing?
If Slack was previously offering a nonprofit discount, what happened to it? Did they decide that this organization was ineligible, or are they shutting it down in general?
They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.
A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...
"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."
So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?
I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]
In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.
And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.
You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
(But I would also start making backups regularly, because who knows if how long this would last)
In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
As such, you need to be able to review the legal status of every pairing or group of people's private chats.
At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.
In a single legal entity?
> At any point in time a US based customer might invite a EU based customer, so looking specifically at US jurisdictions is irrelevant.
What case law are you considering when you insinuate that Slack must review the retention of records between users of a Slack business customer?
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
[0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS)
[1] https://zulip.comIf those any of those 4 screenshot snippets are of Mattermost, it's not very clear. All I see is screenshots of what appears to be Slack.
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.
Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.
For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.
The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.
Yeah doesnt help immediate operational issues but at least there is no lost data that way.
Or you can use an out of the box host, but then your data is not in your direct control.
I'm not too familiar with Slack pricing but it suggests in the Fair Billing policy[0] that they bill per active member. Without any discounts, the Pro pricing is $7.25 per active user per month, if paid annually.[1] If they are needing to pay $200,000 annually, then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
[0]: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin...
This pricing model makes no sense for a non-profit that is trying to teach coding to teenagers worldwide. They will have a lot of users (remember) who might only send one or two messages once in a while. having to pay $7.25, for some who just asked a single question, is essentially extortion for a non profit like that who's primary purpose involves reaching out to as many people a possible.
> then I think that means they have over 2,000 active members in their Slack which does not sound like a "small nonprofit" to me.
those are not employees, but most likely the people they are trying to help.
Would make much more sense to use Discord.
Maybe that doesn't move the needle on whether they're a small non-profit or not for you, but it's different than a massive non-profit like, say, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which also receives millions of dollars per year to facilitate their mission.
You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
In 2023 they had $11.4 million in revenue, almost entirely donations, and spent about $6 million. They had about $10 million in assets.
You can see full financial and donor information at https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/ as well. Check it out. It's an organization that lots of HN folks would support (and many do). (I am on the board of Hack Club.)
Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till February but this would make a nice Christmas project.
rowanG077•1h ago
Waterluvian•1h ago
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
DangitBobby•1h ago
pcl•1h ago
desultir•1h ago
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
triceratops•53m ago
* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "maximize profits".
Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.
The board designs their compensation package that way because they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're acting in shareholders' interests.
krackers•1h ago
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
smithcoin•1h ago
buzzerbetrayed•1h ago
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.
gary_0•48m ago
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
mr_tristan•11m ago
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
greyface-•1h ago
stevage•52m ago
hopelite•1h ago
Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
greyface-•1h ago
High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.