Slack puts pressure on non-profit Hack Club – Community speaks of blackmail
Slack raises prices for Hack Club, a global youth programming community. The organization wants to take action, but Slack is reconsidering the offer.
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The non-profit project Hack Club, which organizes programming communities for young people worldwide, accuses Slack of drastic price increases and unfair treatment. In an open letter, Hack Club employee Mahad Kalam wrote that the communications service had unexpectedly demanded a payment of $50.000 within a week and $200.000 annually in the future. If the organization did not agree, the Slack workspace would be deactivated and the entire message history deleted, he said.
Hack Club criticizes Slack price jump
– Hack Club had been using Slack for almost eleven years and had switched from a free non-profit plan to a $5.000 annual subscription a few years ago. According to Hack Club, it did so willingly because the offer was considered fair. However, the sudden cost explosion has now caused chaos: volunteers and employees would have to set up new integrations and migrate data in a very short time, which would massively impact ongoing programs.
Mahad Kalam emphasized that Salesforce (Slack's parent company) is exerting "massive pressure" on a non-profit organization for young people. A transition period of at least several months would have been expected with such a price increase.
After public criticism went viral on Hacker News and social networks, among other places, Slack CEO Denise Dresser contacted Hack Club. According to Mahad Kalam, she made an improved offer, "better than the previous plan," but he did not provide any details.
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Switch to Mattermost was on the table
Before the peace offering, the logical consequence for Hack Club seemed to be a switch to Mattermost, an open-source alternative to Slack that can be self-hosted and offers organizations more control over their data. In a later post on Hacker News, however, the club's co-founder explained that Slack had not only restored the previous terms, but even improved them. This means that the youth community can now stay after all.
This is not the first time Slack has been publicly criticized for sudden price increases. The Kubernetes team also recently faced the threat of losing their account and considered switching to Discord. The chat provider, which belongs to Salesforce, finally relented and maintained the special terms for Kubernetes.
(mdo)
