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Comment by novatea | Hacker News Reader

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)

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Another good lesson here: at the end of the day, these are just websites. Don't lose sleep over it. If it's broken for a couple of days, that's ok.

I've migrated one of my projects from Slack to Mattermost (integration) in a couple of days.

I have no idea about Zulip, it was harder to setup under pressure than Mattermost was.

welcome to hacking, i guess. this is the real working experience that youll need in the industry

Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need. It happens, but should not be in the curriculum for kids.

I am sure that being forced to spend time on this steals time from more interesting projects.

Skyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.

This is incorrect, Hack Club was informed of this last Monday.

Informed of the final cut-off date, sure!

How long have they had the bill mentioned in the top comment on this post? At the very least it's 3 weeks, and the comment suggests it is months.

It wasn’t slack, but I’ve had multiple vendors that I was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8 business days before the renewal was due.

Both times I’ve paid the new price for 1 year and cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next year when we didn’t renew.

In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment on this post).

I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue crash into a wall and then complaining online about it doesn't help anyone.

I get that regardless there were warning signs, but it honestly seems like slack either miscommunicated or flat out lied to them about the ability to address pricing. While in retrospect they should have started preparing to migrate away, it's human nature to assume good intentions and hope that things will work out well.

There's a couple of interpretations here.

1. The sales rep really thought they would be able to retain good pricing for them and it fell through, and at the last minute hackclub was blindsided by their inability to retain the pricing.

2. The sales rep thought that hackclub was likely to jump ship if they had time to plan based on the new pricing, and lied to them about the possibility of retaining pricing. And thought that by doing so they could force at least one year of higher cost.

3. Hack Club is misrepresenting their communications with Slack to drum up public approval.

My guess is that option 1 is the most likely, and the optimism of the sales rep ended up being a net negative, and human nature being what it is, Hack Club thought things would work out, and everyone is already busy so why borrow trouble.

As for complaining online, sadly it seems that bad press is the only lever that most people have as a forcing factor for companies these days. I honestly only had a Twitter account for a long time, just so I could complain about companies in public to get them to do the right thing, so unfortunately complaining online does actually help.

No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!

How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).

I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.

Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.

> 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

From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.

"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go very sideways.

Change "Skyfall" to "Hack Club". It's a bit confusing who is who!

My bad, I took the org name to be "Skyfall". Just substitue "Hack Club" for any time I mention it!

> Getting the rug pulled under you does not qualify as an experience you need.

I disagree; this is the best time to unlearn "companies selling proprietary software are our friends"

Arguably it's a more valuable lesson than any technical lesson: ignoring existing open source projects in favour of proprietary stuff should hurt.

The more it hurts the better the lesson sticks.

Maybe a good use case for AI to help with a quick transition?

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