The special rate was charity.
To some degree, reduced rates for non-profit organization and schools are not offered because large companies want to be nice, but because they want to catch future customers.
Maybe, but that's not what happened here. It wasn't "a rate better suited to an organisation's usage patterns", it was, more precisely "A heavily/1% reduced rate."
No reasonable person can have the expectation that a discount of $195k on a $200k bill is going to continue forever!
At this discount, it really is charity.
It's more a tacit admission by Slack that their pricing model can't possible work for orgs that don't match a strict employer-employee model.
Nobody would agree to pay per-seat for every customer who uses a support tool, for example (which is much closer to the model this nonprofit is operating)
The biggest issue is the abrupt change in policy. Slack had wanted Hack Club's patronage and had supported it. (Shoot, getting Slack visible to tens of thousands of future decision makers instead of Discord where these users all naturally congregate was a major win!)
To abruptly demand a massive immediate payment after a month's worth of mixed signals, from a small nonprofit, is messed up.
It doesn't matter that an alternate method of counting would be a lot more. They paid a reasonable amount for what they got.
$200k for this service is a joke, not the 'real' price.
Then they should have chosen a chat server that has that as the business model.
The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
Slack was obviously unsuitable for them because Slack does not offer what they wanted (free for non-employees), but the decision maker blundered on. And now they want sympathy.
> The decision maker didn't. They chose a product that did not offer that option, then negotiated the $200k down to $5k.
And in doing so Slack added that business model. And seemed happy about it.
> Slack does not offer what they wanted
They offered it to them.
> And now they want sympathy.
They deserve plenty of sympathy for Slack not giving them any reasonable warning as they torpedoed the deal. And it's not like they were draining Slack's resources or doing anything that made this an emergency.