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: [email protected]
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups.
You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
(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.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.
Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].
Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?
Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.
[0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS)
[1] https://zulip.com
Slack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways.
(- a hack club member)
Slack seem to be doing this to a wide range of groups. The Kubernetes project and CNCF were told by Slack that they would lose access to the paid version with quite short notice.
In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory.
If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
Our company is thinking of moving to Slack from Teams. In addition we use Salesforce. I have already reached out to senior decision-makers pointing out do we want to be paying for a company's services that resorts to this kind of behaviour, when very credible alternatives exist.
I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)
A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them.
And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator program.
But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of customers.
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
I created an HN account solely to share this. A couple of years ago, our edutech company experienced a fourfold increase in Slack usage, was given weeks in notice too. We promptly transitioned to Google Chat (which we were paying for through Google Suite). Back then, Google Chat was quite inadequate, but I must admit that it now fulfills nearly 99% of the functions we used Slack for. Considering the numerous integrations with Google Suite products, it might even exceed 100% now. However, Google Suite promptly raised its prices when they integrated Gemini. Nevertheless, the Google account manager provided us with significantly more advanced notice and a substantial discount.
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
You all are amazing. Thank you so much to everyone who helped raise awareness and advocate for Hack Club. That wasn't the goal of my post yesterday (I mostly wanted to pre-empt #hackclub-leeks because I knew GitHub activity would show up :stuck_out_tongue:), but wow - you made a huge difference, especially @mahad's blog post that went viral. Thank you.
I have some great news. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.
She was incredibly apologetic for putting Hack Clubbers in this position and very generously offered to donate Slack Enterprise+ to Hack Club with a 5 year commitment. We think this is the best option, so we're going to move forward. Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November!
We hope this will be a great start to a renewed relationship as Hack Club has benefited tremendously from Slack's 11 year partnership. We're very grateful.
This means that all of Hack Club's history and bots will be preserved. Additionally, it will open up the path for a special Hack Club OAuth login flow to reduce friction for new Hack Clubbers and APIs to build better moderation tools.
Thank you to the enormous outpouring of support. There have been so many kind messages, emails, and even alumni from years ago reaching out. It's meant the world as we've navigated this difficult situation. @here
Hi! An official announcement from Zach Latta has been made in the Hack Club Slack.
We're moving to Mattermost now and we're trying to export all messages, DMs, etc.
Disclaimer: I am a member of Hack Club's Slack and NOT a working personnel there.
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
>We made a mistake.
>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 value the work Hack Club does to inspire and educate young people in coding and technology, and we regret the concern this situation has caused. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
This isn't just you. We have quite a few clients in this same boat. (One client is migrating to Teams in a couple of weeks for this exact reason.) We have quite a few RIA clients, and because of archiving requirements, this is happening to every single one of them. These aren't poor companies, but Slack is making it really hard to justify the expense anymore. We will have quite a few companies dump them when renewal comes around.
[+] [-] casq|5 months ago|reply
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: [email protected]
[+] [-] dhdresser|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seamanrob|5 months ago|reply
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:.
[+] [-] casq|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mpeg|5 months ago|reply
When I worked there, weirder emails ended up getting addressed.
[+] [-] taegee|5 months ago|reply
We recently moved to Mattermost for the same reason. Not looking back.
[+] [-] jamie|5 months ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] bastardoperator|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rozap|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] p_l|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] n-exploit|5 months ago|reply
It's open source and you own your own data.
[+] [-] linhns|5 months ago|reply
Of all communities I wonder why Hack Club was targeted though. One of the truly good ones.
[+] [-] cptskippy|5 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ghm2199|5 months ago|reply
Fight a monster with a frankenmonster.
[+] [-] southernplaces7|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anonbuddy|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrash|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lukec11|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fn-mote|5 months ago|reply
https://hackclub.com/
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
[+] [-] chrisasquith|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|5 months ago|reply
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
[+] [-] deeringc|5 months ago|reply
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
[+] [-] aramsh|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|5 months ago|reply
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
[+] [-] steezeburger|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jrubinovitz|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kaladin-jasnah|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|5 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] actionfromafar|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] realityfactchex|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Charmunk|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raesene9|5 months ago|reply
In their case the change was reverted (I think it caught the eye of someone sufficiently senior at Salesforce), but if you're running a non-profit on Slack and not paying full price, I'd strongly recommend looking at alternatives...
[+] [-] tux3|5 months ago|reply
If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
[+] [-] SeanDav|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nodar86|5 months ago|reply
I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)
A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
[+] [-] btown|5 months ago|reply
And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they could still do things like "users who spend less than X minutes a month browsing/posting, and join only community-visible channels, are considered community tier" so that employees who spend more than that (or even who want to have a single private DM) are still charged. And have a generous nonprofit/open-source/startup-accelerator program.
But by forcing every company to treat every active user as a fully licensed user, they ceded the community space to Discord entirely, an unforced error that likely lost them an entire generation or more of customers.
[+] [-] jacinda|5 months ago|reply
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
[+] [-] tatsumaki19|5 months ago|reply
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
[+] [-] pythonatsea|5 months ago|reply
You all are amazing. Thank you so much to everyone who helped raise awareness and advocate for Hack Club. That wasn't the goal of my post yesterday (I mostly wanted to pre-empt #hackclub-leeks because I knew GitHub activity would show up :stuck_out_tongue:), but wow - you made a huge difference, especially @mahad's blog post that went viral. Thank you.
I have some great news. @Christina Asquith and I just got off a call with Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.
She was incredibly apologetic for putting Hack Clubbers in this position and very generously offered to donate Slack Enterprise+ to Hack Club with a 5 year commitment. We think this is the best option, so we're going to move forward. Additionally, she is going to join us in-person at #athena-award's 200-person hackathon in NYC in November!
We hope this will be a great start to a renewed relationship as Hack Club has benefited tremendously from Slack's 11 year partnership. We're very grateful.
This means that all of Hack Club's history and bots will be preserved. Additionally, it will open up the path for a special Hack Club OAuth login flow to reduce friction for new Hack Clubbers and APIs to build better moderation tools.
Thank you to the enormous outpouring of support. There have been so many kind messages, emails, and even alumni from years ago reaching out. It's meant the world as we've navigated this difficult situation. @here
[+] [-] okcoder1|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] novatea|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Agreed3750|5 months ago|reply
>We made a mistake. >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 value the work Hack Club does to inspire and educate young people in coding and technology, and we regret the concern this situation has caused. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
[+] [-] matt-p|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|5 months ago|reply
Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
[+] [-] Hobadee|5 months ago|reply