Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week Slack sent a nonprofit hacking club for teens a demand for $50,000, payable within a week, and threatened to delete the club’s message archive if it did not pay. That horror scenario came to light in a Thursday post by Mahad Kalam, who helps out at Hack Club, a nonprofit that works to run coding clubs at high schools. Slack …
having been arguing against cloud for years, stories like this just justify my stance. With costs & the randomness of charging VMware & Nutanix pricing looks better and better, especially when you get to keep your data where you want it AND you know you won't get this craziness
This is just standard, modern enshittification. A group of MBA's in Slack realized that their quarteries would look so much better by charging non-profits, non-profits designed to serve teens no less, 4x what they previously decided was adequate.
Let's see: a quick news search shows
https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/09/20/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-just-delivered-fantast/
just 2 days ago, the CEO of Slack's owner, Salesforce, glorifying a profit report by a competitor and stating
“I am so inspired by that company. Not just because they have a 100x multiple on revenue, which I would love to have.
“But the prices they charge to their customers — it’s gotta be the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.”
- https://x.com/jawwwn_/status/1966955141288096007
What, you thought an *MBA graduate* Marc Benioff, would stand there and NOT raise his prices to match, when he sees someone else getting the goat?
Want the world to go straight to hell? Keep making MBA's.
(https://medium.com/@leighmckiernon/how-mbas-ruined-the-world-a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-end-of-civilization-as-we-knew-it-e94b76ea4738)
Indeed, having been encouraged by TPTB to put all our work stuff in the cloud (namely OneDrive) over the last few years, recently our institute IT department has been sending everyone missives to reduce their OneDrive storage because Microsoft are changing their pricing structure and it would cost considerably more from next year if we all kept all our stuff in their cloud.
Cloud is a terrible idea for so many reasons, more people are realising the promises that were made to get them to sign up just aren't worth the electrons they're displayed with.
The one silver lining is that, like fashion, technology always comes round again and on prem is beginning to look attractive again after the high profile outages of recent years
"for using someone else's software on someone else's computers."
I expect for $5k/yr, it wouldn't be too hard to set up a private message server. Maintenance could also be done by volunteers.
If anybody knows of some good multi-platform BBS software, do post a link please.
Slack are particularly poor though.
There's an F1 podcast I enjoy that used to have it's patreon thing on a slack group.
This all changed one day when the host got charged $2K because one of the members had managed to enable a feature, and slack just charged whatever credit card it had on file. Didn't matter that the person wasn't an admin, or the owner of the card.
To be fair to slack they did reverse the charge (after initially just crediting the host with 2K on his slack account), but it left a sour taste.
They quickly moved to discord, which is a better fit anyway.
discord is no better and you are still at the mercy of what ever corpo bollocks they decide to screw you with.
Discord (in this instance) is much better, the community is much more vibrant than it was before.
True, you're still at the mercy of Discord rather than Slack.Is this something you could avoid though? Also, personally I think for an ephemeral F1 discussion forum it's fine. You're not going to be losing years of important company history if you leave, just Verstappen chat.
Bring back IRC as a normal way to chat with people.
It wouldn't work. This is an F1 community, not an IT community. Discords slightly easier access made the community more vibrant than Slack did, whilst IRC is technically a great platform it's also a barrier to entry that would put many people off. They'd go use facebook or similar. Without sufficient engagement the community doesn't really work.
If you wanted to use IRC you'd have to modernise it, and make participation easier.
You'd probably want to host a centralised IRC server that your users connect to.
Then you're probably going to want a nice easy to use multi platform client for them to download too. (Remember this thing really needs to be mobile first). This means you're probably going to end up with something electron based as your UI.
In order to get usage up you're probably going to have to make it free at the point of use, so that means advertising and possibly a subscription service. This means you're probably going to be downplaying the IRC aspect a bit, and eventually deprecating it so people use your client that you can see a revenue stream from. (This thing is going to cost to run after all).
Also.. don't forget you need a name... Discord, Slack and Teams are taken at this point.... ;)
What we don't know is when the first demand was made.
This does not appear to have been disclosed. To be clear I am not supporting Slack however if this has been ongoing for an extended period there does come a point where if you don't pay the service is cut off.
The same for a phone service........
And the only way to get around this predatory behaviour was to raise a public stink. The only reason Slack did anything to make amendments was that this became public and they did not like the publicity. Imagine a nonprofit that does not have this social media reach.
Run your own machines, get a colocation somewhere or a cheap server from dunno, strato, and another from whoever so you have two plus local backup. Those are not too expensive, last time I checked, though I don't know about their actual requirements.
> Run your own machines, get a colocation somewhere or a cheap server from dunno, strato, and another from whoever so you have two plus local backup.
Good advice - if you have the know how to do so.
Size, build and maintain hardware (or use a hosted bare-bone VM), maintain OS, setup and maintain applications needed to build the functionalitity, build redundnancy/clustering as needed, do backups, test restores, resize/upgrade as needed for the business. Tune and optimize, provide call-out 24x7 as needed, ...
This can become a pretty expensive piece of labor, if you are not a hacking club and cannot do it inhouse.
And many of the non-profits or small for-profits using SaaS as the go-to choice never had the know how to begin with.
For us geeks, this is all bread and butter stuff. But for most people it's not: It's totally outside of their domain experience. That's why they pay someone to do it for them. (It's why I take my car to a garage to be serviced)
I'm perfectly capable of running my own email system (SMTP, IMAP, web mail, anti-spam, etc) - and I did for about a decade. Eventually I got fed up of the grind of it and I now pay Fastmail for mail.
I’ve seen this a few times. One was a large UK company storing data for a government body. When it came to transferring the data away, their reply was ‘no, we own the data’.
There was another incident reported by The Register a while ago. The company went insolvent, and customers were told to pay £xxxxx now or lose the data on the servers rented to you.
Sadly, it’s not confined to software and servers. We received a notification from TalkTalk a couple of years ago stating that our leased line would be changed mid-contract from a fixed-fee to whatever they decided to charge. They gave customers 30 calendar days to quit their contract, or be tied into the new contract for the remainder of the agreement, knowing full well that it’s almost impossible to get a leased line installed from anywhere else in that time. Their charges have increased by around 50% since.
After a decade or so of telling anyone who would listen not to touch TalkTalk with a bargepole guess who I ended up with? I was with Shell Energy broadband when they were bought by Octopus as part of buying all of Shell Energy, then sold on to TalkTalk. Don't recall being given any choice in the matter and didn't fancy the exit fees so I had to endure over a year with them. I run my own router, a pair of pi-holes and pay Mythic Beasts a massive three quid a month for email and hosting so I just needed them to keep the link up basically. Had a two day outage last month but that was all, although not being able to connect to my Plex server sitting right in front of me was the push I needed to sort out Jellyfin!
I escaped TalkTalk's clutches a month ago. Interesting times, for basically the same price as my previous 47Mb FTTC plan I now get 150Mb FTTP that was installed free of charge, although OpenReach did their best to cock it up. There's a telegraph post directly opposite my house but the engineer (sub-contracted) turned up with a worksheet telling him to lay 150m of cable through a duct to an access point round the corner. By sheer luck it turned out that both access points hooked into the same section of their network so all was good.
Now for the "between clenched teeth" bit. I'm now with Vodafone, who I have to say stink as a company. However their broadband has a couple of features that I badly wanted:
1. They are happy for you to use your own router and getting the necessary login details is trivial.
2. Years ago I thought that I got a wonderful deal when Plusnet only charged a one-off payment of a fiver for a static IP address. Vodafone give it to you for nothing, you just have to ask.
That means that I've finally been able to get my private Vaultwarden instance up and running and has given the little grey cells a workout getting to grips with the likes of Docker, Caddy and reverse proxies.
Hmmm, well I've been with talk-talk for years. Their customer service may be bad, but I've never needed to use them.
I've had one 20 minute outage during that time. All I need from them is a pipe, and as the cheapest option, they do the job just fine.
I guess my packets aren't as snobby as some of the posters here - like me, they aren't swayed by "designer labels".
Now, I always get 9.5MB/s on this FTTC circuit, and whilst I'm lucky that I have a relatively new line, and the cabinet is very close, that would be the same whichever over-the-phone-line provider I used.
Why should I pay more? To impress the geeks?
Native IPv6 would be nice, but my HE tunnel deals with that - and that also lets me have a static /48 and reverse DNS delegation, and as the tunnel sits directly on the (asus) router, my lans effectively have it.
"I read this and thought I wouldn’t be happy paying 5000 anythings a month for a service which costs them a fraction of this to run"
It had been $5k/yr which might not be too bad depending on the service provided and how big this Hack Club was. If there are 10,000 people in it, that's $0.50/yr/person. If everybody pays $5/yr that should be enough to cover a few that can't pay and payment processing fees.
Sure, they'll have people who can do it.
Should they? Not necessarily. Operating a service for that kind of user community is an almost 24/7 commitment, and volunteers are a limited resource. Their talents may be better spant at moderating discussions, creating challenges, giving hints, ... teacher-y stuff rather than fixing misbehaving updates at 3am.
I operate servers jsut for my family and a teen org of a much smaller scale, and it requires more intermittent effort than I woudl have imagined - usually when I'm on a business trip sevral timezones away.
So, in theory, outsourcing operation of something like Slack has its appeal, but it comes at a (possibly unaffordable) price.
Lesson learned: Have solid contracts in place, with reasonable pre-warning of contract cahnges built-in, and ensure data portability. A solution that is self-hostable may be best, even if you buy it as a cloud service - this way you can go on-premise if needed.
And run it as SaaS..? The moral of this story is to control your own data:
> “This ordeal has made us think more deeply about entrusting data with external SaaSes and ensuring that we own our data is definitely going to be a very big priority going forward. I’d encourage you to think the same way!”
The hacking club should contribute to open source they rely on, maybe help create generic service bridges others and at most maybe help people/organisations migrate to self hosted. They should not become the next company that gets bought/invested in/donated to and has to apply pressure to others to keep financiers happy.
A non-for-profit I did work for, I set up the support service to work in collaboration with a local college/university: their students got work experience and a placement, we got cheap support. Obviously, it needed some experienced hands to set up and run, but the arrangement meant both the non-profit and the college could call on additional funding due to the community engagement, youth employment and training.
Unfortunately a change in CEO resulted in a CEO who had little understanding of non-profit financing and the smoke and mirrors needed to get IT funding, decided to “untangle” things, net result real terms annual IT support spend did a x4; with funders adverse to IT opex costs, that’s a difficult sum of money to find…
All of my email traffic is archived and backed up locally and that includes a number of long running support lists. I have been asked on a number of occasions either why do I keep 25+ year old traffic or why don't I just leave it on the server, but I don't have to worry about either the volume of stored messages or 'exceeding my quota', and I can go back through the history of a development at leisure. If that history was duplicated across many other users then it would remain available and THAT is what cloud computing should be about? Independent duplication not tied to one particular monopoly and protected from this sort of harassment.
That many key elements of the development scene have been hijacked by corporate greed just makes a transparent shared network even more essential. No reliance on the likes of github's central strangle hold, or any of the other single supplier systems?
"I have been asked on a number of occasions either why do I keep 25+ year old traffic or why don't I just leave it on the server,"
I've seen plenty of people use Google to manage their email and they leave everything online. They never stop to think what happens when they can't get online, Google is down or there is a sudden policy shift and any message over 90 day old that is marked read will be deleted in 5,4,3,2.....
Text is really easy to archive and takes up very little space compared to the size of drives these days. Chances are that I'll never need to access the information in those archives, but it's a non-zero chance and so easy to do that there's no point in not doing it. I can also review current messages at any time and get back to a customer even if my internet connection is fubar.
The slack messaging system is owned by Salesforce which might appear to be doing a Broadcom (get rid of low revenue customers).
This saga has similarities with the Oracle raid on Java licence fees for universities here in the UK: both want to charge per seat for a large number of people who are not employees, volunteers and participants in the case of Hack Club and non-tech students in the case of the universities.
Lessons will not be lost on the young people I think.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/20/uk_colleges_45m_saving_deal/
When I was 7 (I know, because we were holidaying in London for the summer at the time) all through the school summer holidays - even right at the start, Mothercare used to constantly have adverts on local London radio with the jingle "With Mothercare, go back to school".
It drove me mad. I vowed to never shop in Mothercare... and I never did.
That was over 40 years ago!
"Who knows, some of them may be making purchasing decisions in the future."
Or their boss might be looking for something and they can say "I've used this before and it would work well for us to solve this issue". Bonus, that person has experience using it so it's not a case of starting from zero trying to figure a new piece of software.
"The slack messaging system is owned by Salesforce which might appear to be doing a Broadcom (get rid of low revenue customers)."
They might find that those low-revenue people are the ones using the software at home for a local club and at work for a good size company. It might not be that they are losing money by having some low-cost services but that people aren't using something at work for non-work things.
I bought a copy of DaVinci Resolve after running their free version until I was competent enough to get real work done. The free version is missing some of the cooler tools and doesn't have company support (but massive loads elsewhere. What the free version is doing is pulling people away from Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier and a load of other more primitive free/low cost video editing software to the point where they now have a very big slice of the pie. If they abandon that tactic, somebody may come along and do to them what they did to others and release a useful free version. Even still photographers are needing to add video to their arsenal as online ads are more and more often animated to some extent so there's movement that draws attention. That's increasing the need for people that have editing skills. If I can learn all of the basics with a fully functional free version, that let's me train for a job that might otherwise not be accessible. I'd need to be in the business to be able to learn the software at an employer whose paid for it.
All of it is proprietary malware full of antifeatures (if a function is already implemented, if a programmer makes features artificially not work, while also withholding the source code (so that the user cannot go re-enable the feature) such action is clearly an act of malice, which means such software is malicious software and therefore is malware).
It's incredible that so many people fall for "free shackles" that aren't even gratis.
If you are going to learn how to do video editing, you should learn how to do it with a free software program (whether that's gratis or costs money), so you don't learn dependence and therefore get screwed over time and time again (learning proprietary also means having to learn again and again, as proprietary programs often reach "end of life" and that's it).
A lot of places I've worked use one piece of software for text messages and another one for video ones. The only time I've seen it done differently was with Teams users who did both with that. Why should that be the case; after all, Slack can do video calls and most video platforms can do text chat? I can see a few small reasons, but most of the time, I just have to use what they set up and am not asked to judge it (programmer, not IT).
It was written to be a *replacement* for proprietary software.
The alternatives to choose between are all the free chat protocols like irc and xmpp etc and the many implementations of such - clearly slack has no placing in those alternatives.
A GNU replacement is always possible, but it's not always easy - but of course it's hard - it's a computer.
Slack has always been on my sh*t list. They were one of those companies that uses the infiltration model to sell their service: employee can sign up using their business email, then you suddenly have an official-looking workspace they can invite others to. Suddenly half the company is using it, and you're going to need a paid plan for compliance purposes.
"Suddenly half the company is using it, and you're going to need a paid plan for compliance purposes."
I worked at a place that had no software plan and things got put into place higildy pigildy. A couple of people would be using something and add a few more and then the whole department. The problem was that the art department is all on Macs and it's a Windows only product which means part of the engineering department using Linux is also blocked. I suggested that there be some sort of meeting to decide if some functionality would be handy to have and then find something that would work at least office-wide if not at all locations together. I was told to shut up.
For funding the enemies of humanity - you pay them a massive $5000 a year and they turn around and demand $50,000 more within a week and $200,000 a year - with the additional extortion of threatening to delete all your information if you don't pay fast enough.
Every time you think about making a payment for proprietary software or SaaSS - think twice and don't do it - as the more you pay - the more you and the rest of humanity gets burned.
Is what he should of told her
"The post understandably gathered a lot of attention, including from Slack CEO Denise Dresser, who Kalam says “got in contact with us and offered to put things right (I can’t exactly say what it is, but it’s better than the plan we were on previously!)”"
She got in contact because of the bad publicity so don't think about moving, he should continue to move and tell them to go fuck a duck. If they've done this once, they'll do it again.
At a place we were at, that should of been paying, they decided to use the free version. All in IT pointed out how shit it was back then, it was new but we knew they were doing this to suck people in so they'd then have to pay once the policy changed.
Finally, they noticed that old posts were no longer available on the free plan, despite them thinking they could get away without paying. We scraped it and went with another system.
When will execs listen to their IT engineers. Oh I know, never.
We've been using it for years, ever since Slack tried to do the same to us. The free community edition of Mattermost is so functionally close to Slack that none of the users ever complain, and it doesn't take much maintenance to keep it going. We sat it on a cheap EC2 server and saved thousands of dollars over what Slack would have charged us. We have a history of messages, images, videos, that belongs to us and won't ever be used to blackmail us into paying more. I always assumed that "Slack" was named after its attitude to whether the the company should aim for a good moral standing. It's up there with Adobe and Oracle for "pay up now because All Your Data Are Belong To Us".
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