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.
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.
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.
Honestly just a heuristic that says any company simply on principle would rather leave than eat a 4000% price increase.
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?
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.
"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?
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(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...
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.
Anyone fancy building on for self hosting? Im booked up solid till February but this would make a nice Christmas project.
Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
==
The problem with posts like this is that they give a very one-sided view of the situation and don't allow an uninformed reader (i.e., everyone other than the author and those close to them with direct knowledge of the situation) to understand the backstory and the reasoning for the pricing change.
I'm having to do Google searches to understand why this might have happened, and can only speculate. Is it that previously this company was eligible for a heavy discount as a nonprofit, and now something about that has changed? What has changed? We're not told anything.
According to their website, Slack offers discounts to charities [1] and educational institutions [2]. Does this organisation qualify now? Did they qualify previously? Has something changed in the organisation's status, or in Slack's policies, or has the organisation been misclassified and Slack has only just noticed? This post doesn't even attempt to explain any of those details.
I'm not saying that what Slack did was justifiable. It sounds like a terrible situation for this organization to be in, and I sympathize.
But without knowing any details at all about Slack's basis for making this change, this is the kind of post that generates a lot of heat but not much light.
[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/204368833-Apply-f...
[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/206646877-Apply-f...
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: christina@hackclub.com
I was unable to find another system. Would anyone recommend me something?
Sometimes the phone wouldn't ring, rarely did video work.
The element app for android doesn't notify correctly unless the app is open.
For day to day desktop chat it's great, but it falls apart on videoconferencing and mobile
This is why I use open source or buy services based more on the company than the product itself... Not a fan of rug-pulls...
They are using open source licenses simply as marketing for their proprietary enterprise software product.
It’s still better to self host than to use a SaaS, but the situation isn’t improved quite as much as one might think.
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
And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.
Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
but in the grand scheme of things, why we have "slack" anyway
developer community that make the most OSS project rely heavily on close source system as a "de facto" industry standard is weird one
it not like slack has a secret sauce either, but having most critical infrastructure as a main source of communication while the very same community that proud to be release OSS product is a bit strange
I have no exposure to pricing, but the fact they talk to people directly impressed me immensely.
IETF uses meetecho and it has meeting-support stuff including speaker control and voting mechanisms (I know, we dont vote in the IETF...) which I think are interesting. Thats more useful in the live online state. Again, the devs are unusually available.
I don't personally like discord, although many FOSS projects are on it. I think the whole stickers and like just .. turn me off.
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...
There are plenty more reasons to avoid using Slack, see: Reasons not to use Slack by Richard Stallman <https://stallman.org/slack.html>
It's like the cloud all over again. Pull that brain of yours out of the backseat, where you put it, start actually using it and host your own shit for $5 a month, FFS!
Take care about how you plan infrastructure.
I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.
If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.
All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
Did they show up with a baseball bat in hand? That’s some big city mobster tactics right there
Unfortunately,this should be the sentiment with all SaaS projects.
When a platform, like in this case, is inherent to the value proposition and can not easily be exchanged (building programs around it), one should consider self hosting.
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.
Sounds about right, sad to hear that it caused so much strife though.
Meanwhile, did a bit of a test drive in my org with Mattermost, devs were mostly okay with it, but it was decided from top down to go with Teams instead. Wonder how that will work out in the next decade.
Since I'm located in europe, I thought of just doing a data request based on GDPR (at least for my messages). They declined it and referred me to my organization, since we are in charge of fulfilling such requests (how would we even do that if there's no functionality for it?). Absolutely ridiculous.
when you are that stupid to "happily" pay 5k a year for their chat tool, you deserve that raise to 195k
Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
Sympathetic to the customers, but not surprised.
I work in education sector, over the last year or so multiple saas providers have pulled this, we've inevitably gone in house, self hosted, open source. Saved tonnes of money and have bought skills back in house.
I wish there were other alternatives. Mattermost is pretty rough. Search is not great, mobile apps are sometimes unstable, chat organization and reminders are pretty bare-bones. The markdown-powered textarea is nice though, unlike Slack's weird interface.
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...
>However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.
>One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more.
This summary from your website misses a lot of relevant detail. I love to rag on big corp as much as the next free thinker, but the dishonesty makes me much less sympathetic to this particular story.
For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles.
For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs).
MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals.
And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.
I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.
So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.
I went through the whole slack->mattermost pipeline a very long time ago to avoid (at the time) Skype for business and the initial rollout of Teams.
It turns out we wasted a lot of time trying to be clever and not pay the devil for his services. Unfortunately, there are some proprietors in the space who occasionally make the devil look like a saint. I'd rather do business with him than return a call to a "at least it's not you-know-who" company that fucked me this hard. The devil is brutal but not this brutal. Larry Ellison would at least have his sales people buy me a fancy steak dinner first.
They don't do "Sales", they do "Salesforce"d.
It will be a matter of time before Hack Club needs to migrate to something else again.
People naturally love coding, especially teens. It's addictive. And it no longer leads to any career prospects, or chances to contribute to society, or money, or anything really. It's over as a mass occupation. Addicting teens to it does them a bad service. In the future, personality traits that will lead to happiness and success will be opposite to those nurtured by coding, or are typical among professional coders: empathy, likability, social skills... Kids who got hooked on coding now, are heading for a life of misery.
…Which renders upside down. Maybe an Australia joke? The primary server appears to be at slack.hackclub.com
But seeing how they just treated Hack Club — sudden 40x price hike, almost no notice, threatening to cut off access and delete 11 years of history — makes me wonder if we should rethink where we build our work.
I don’t want to leave Slack. But I also don’t want to wake up one day with our team’s history held hostage.
I don't participate in Slack communities, leaves me out of some Kubernetes communities and such.
Honestly I'd pick Discord before I pick Slack.
Not really surprised, XMPP was such a fragmented mess, lead by a bunch of people clueless about average user's woes.
"let's make features optional so depending on your client AND server some things just outright not work!"
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back at some point before the entire world are vassals to the same 5-10 megacap US tech companies.
Communities on Slack don't make sense anymore, Discord is better for that nowadays and an OSS solution is even better.
cheers to all
Slack is fundamentally wrong for this kind of thing. Every time I find out the support channels for anything is a slack server, I groan. The whole workspace setup is awful.
Hypothetical easy win for Slack here.
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.
At this rate it's cheaper to pay a full time DevOps team to run several Matrix servers so you have high availability.
I'm left to wonder why do we even use words anymore, when tipping isn't optional, when purchasing doesn't mean you own the thing you buy, and an agreement can be changed without notice.
Why is it called tip and not fee. Why is it called purchase and not rent. Why is it called agreement and not... well I don't even know what to call that... a pinky promise?
We are building a culture of cynicism and calling it progress. It's just pyramid schemes and consumer abuse disguised as innovation.
I just can't trust anything anymore.
Providers will increase price but multi-fold adjustment + for non-profit should really inform way in advance.
It's super simple to build with Stream and far lower costs than Slack. (i'm the CEO, founder so don't take my word for it). But we have quite a few customers building either communities into their app or large companies running integrated chat workflows. (think airline operations, construction collaboration etc.)
Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers far more granular controls.
They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.
Slack has completely gone down hill since the salesforce acquisition.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...
- https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.
I'm curious what they were actually getting for even the $5000/month and how many users there are? Going off the prices on Slack's homepage, for regular users to pay $200,000/year would mean they're working with ~900 users in a work group. I'm wondering if perhaps there's some automation that is kicking in when it shouldn't be?
My dream work chat app:
1. Conversations happen adjacent to internal documentation, with agents constantly writing and updating the docs based on natural human conversations
2. Create topic threads instead of channels. When you open the topic, agents help you identify similar topics that have already been discussed
3. DMs are essentially banned or strongly discouraged because they contribute to information asymmetry (just spin up a topic and scope it to the relevant people, but only for sensitive discussions)
Not affiliated, just sharing in case it’s useful for OP or others.
In California, companies must provide clear written notice of any material change to renewal terms and obtain consent before billing under new terms. Changing pricing from a staff-only basis to billing every user—without a new contract or notice—appears inconsistent with that law.
Telling you to ignore invoices, then demanding immediate payment with a threat of total service shutoff, could be construed as coercive and in bad faith.
Recommendations:
Put everything in writing. Send Salesforce/Slack a formal letter citing Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17600–17606 (Automatic Renewal Law) and demanding they extend service during resolution.
Request a 90-day transition period to migrate, framed as reasonable and legally necessary under consumer protection standards.
Escalate to Salesforce legal/compliance. If necessary, copy the California Attorney General’s consumer protection unit.
Preserve evidence. Save all communications, invoices, and contract copies.
This doesn’t mean you should stop negotiating, but you have a strong basis to demand more time and push back on the sudden payment demand.
>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.
Seriously though, I'm not sure how I've never heard of Hack Club before. I love the cause and wish I had such a thing when I was younger. Hopefully they see an uptick in donations with all the fellow techies reading your post!
My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.
I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.
[0] https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/
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
Oh, 7 days to cough up $50k, cool. Slack enters my list of companies I will never do business with and actively dissuade everyone else from doing so.
Full ack!
IRC is command driven and scary. Terrifying.
That people would pay thousands of dollars a year for vendor lock-in and that will abuse their privacy for a visually pleasing alternative is a quite a business model. It’s like targeting people with a history of abuse because you know they are exploitable and will eagerly fulfill your desires.
Enjoy the veal, unless you were served chicken. In that casw, contact social media and hope someone cares.
There are countless free alternatives available. When did paying for group chat become a thing?
Most companies with these models will die simply because they won't have the courage and long term thinking to do this.
Just don't use it then. It's bloated non-free software. There are all sorts of free alternatives.
Is this still the case? I sure hope so.
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