[blueplanet200]

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.

[seamanrob]

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.

[jrflowers]

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.

[buran77]

> 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.

[kaoD]

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?

[lucideer]

> 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.

[bobdvb]

Is that a good advert for Salesforce?

[jama211]

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.

[Barbing]

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.