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Comment by dhdresser | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.

Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again.

Thanks for holding us accountable.

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I don’t think many readers here will be taken in by this performative apology and believe it is anything other than it is:

“We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”

If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.

Honest question: is there any apology that you would have accepted?

“We’ve committed in writing to indefinite maintenance of the non-profit discount terms at their current percentage to all non-profits, transferable only in the case of merging with another non-profit; to charging non-profits at a percentage of a base rate equal to our lowest base rate charged to any class of customers; and to providing two years of advance notice for base rate increases affecting our non-profit discounted customers.”

This sort of declaration would have demonstrated Slack’s serious commitment to prevention. Each clause carries weight, it costs Slack nothing to provide it, and it prohibits Slack from entire categories of present and future abuses of this nature for all non-profit customers. The CEO’s commitment below does not rise to this bar, leaving the door open for further abuses, and maintaining price increases already extorted from other non-profit customers. Perhaps a future press release will close that gap.

An apology contains three components: acknowledgment of impact, declaration of whether the impact was intentional or accidental, and whether preventative steps will be taken; it also contains one contextual attribute: whether this specific impact has broad implications. The CEO’s apology meets these terms in the case of this specific customer only, without committing to review and reparation of the customer category “non-profit customers”. It is certain other non-profits were impacted, but their concerns are not in-scope for the CEO’s statements, which apologize for a single instance without declaring intent to review and correct others. Most readers would be correct in rejecting it as a relevant apology, however valid it may be for the one customer above.

> Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue ...

An "oversight in our billing process" does not explain why one of your representatives demanded of a long-term customer:

  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.

> As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.

The demand is reported as being made on 2025-09-16.

The post detailing same is dated 2025-09-18.

This HN submission is dated 2025-09-18.

Is it your position that "[as] soon as our team learned about it" is defined as when this HN submission was created and received so much attention?

Because it sure looks that way.

Slack is a giant company at this stage. Is it so impossible to see that countless billing disputes both valid, invalid and injust happen multiple times a day without ever reaching senior teams because they have entire departments for that.

Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...

For as much as it could be Slack's culture to hold hostage your data, it can also be a slightly reckless sales rep looking to strong arm to meet their aggressive targets to save their own job.

> Slack is a giant company at this stage.

So Slack is large enough to not be able to identify "countless billing disputes", which is not what @casq identified as being the situation (note the direction of communication initiation):

  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)[0]

Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?

> Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...

And what would be "the fix" had this interaction remained known only to a customer and Slack?

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280

> 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 Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to deactivate the Hack Club Slack

This all reads to me like dysfunction and incompetence rather than true malice.

> Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?

Yes just like the Sev B of Amazon where a customer could email jeff@amazon.com and rain pain onto people at Amazon. someone else in the large discussion said that from their own company's analysis for developer advocacy impact this kind of HN front page coverage is equivalent to an 8 figure marketing spend so I imagine this got escalated pretty damn fast.

You're right though that it is janky that the only way to be heard is to go public, but equally the negative PR has probably cost them much much more than the comparative peanuts they were hoping to make from this one account.

Someone, or a group of someones, has to be responsible for sending a threat to close down a customers account. (assuming the customer is in fact acting in good faith, honourable, and so on)

Wether that’s giving a serious punishment to one oversealous employee, or a light reprimand to everyone in a department, there has to be some action taken to regain credibility. (along with proof that such action was taken)

as a communications company they sure suck at it. sure there are countless billing disputes, but only backtracking because they got caught out? how many other disputes ended with their victims just paying because they didn't have enough exposure?

A junior rep would not or should not have the access or ability to make 50k+ usd demands of some of the biggest clients on file. This does not sound to me like a junior rep.

Or contrary to that they should not have the ability to delete user data... And make a threat about it.

Hell of a "mistake" to bill a nonprofit 4000% of their typical amount, with a side order of "we're deleting your shit unless you give us about one American truck in cash in 3 days."

Did you happen to review the linked post? TFA would've let you know they're moving off your platform because you sent their entire org into a free-fall panic with your error. Probably already lost it but, IMHO, a VERY generous bill credit MAY get you that client back. Maybe.

Edit: And like, I dunno, I wouldn't just tell someone how to run their business but I feel there should be more oversight in general before your company sounds out threats like that? Like I'm not saying my employer has never jacked somebody up when they're acting goofy, course we have, but that's a PROCESS that involves a LOT of people's sign off, where this reads like your billing script just posted an amount due to a client paired with a demand for money on an EXTREMELY tight deadline for ANY organization, really, complete with the aforementioned threat of deletion.

Like, maybe you should queue those and have an intern do a sanity check? I have a strong feeling you shouldn't have TOO many of these unless this mistake wasn't much of a mistake, right?

FWIW, in case you are not familiar with this forum: a 2700 point story is kind of a big deal, on par with the announcement of GPT-5 (only ~2k points).

The damage to your brand is immense.

It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.

To quantify what I mean by "immense", as a former developer advocacy leader at a large public company, I once modeled HN impact and would estimate this story to be equivalent to a low-to-mid 8 figure marketing spend.

Now I’d love to know more about that model!

Did your model look at "positive impact from publicity of being mentioned on HN", or did it look at "revenue loss from negative story on HN"?

I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.

Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.

Yup, I would’ve considered slack in the past but now I know I never will, considering the CEO’s apology provides no guarantees they’ll help any other client with this issue currently or in the future unless they also cause a media fallout, and no details or transparency on how this occurred.

This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.

The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).

I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.

That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.

As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.

It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.

Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.

If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.

> "Thanks for holding us accountable."

The real fallout from today may be hard to take account of.

I can't be the only one who saw this situation unfold and decided "I'll be certain to self-host if I ever set up something like this"

This "apology" is about as vague as can be. If you actually wished to be accountable, you would be a lot more forthcoming about what happened, exactly which internal processes are the problem and why, and address the fact that the lack of proper data exfiltration was used here as a club to beat hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a nonprofit and longtime client.

I already only use Slack when required, and I have several philosophical issues with your platform, but this is a nail in the coffin for many of us here. I will certainly never recommend Slack and will use this situation and your vague apology as the reason.

Appreciated that you fixed the billing process issue. Are there any other non profits that are effected or it only this one?

I find it hard to believe such an underhanded policy was not approved by senior staff members. Clearly, the negative feedback has forced Slack to change course, but that such a policy was allowed in the first place will be held against Slack by any reasonable person for the foreseeable future.

> Thanks for holding us accountable.

Donation time - May I humbly suggest $195k. Accountability means there are no one way bets, when you stand to gain you stand to lose.

What was the oversight? How did you correct it?

They won’t answer, because they’re not interested in actually being accountable.

Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota

Wait - this is the same Denise Dresser that led led some uber-high-pressure Salesforce enterprise sales teams in 2010s? Something tells me you aren’t really sorry

Blackmail by mistake sorry!

Thank you Denise! Christina (Hack Club cofounder)

You restored their pricing, and thats it? No gesture of goodwill to cover the cost they have borne being stressed and coming on here to post about it?

lol..... what a joke.

yeh that's BS. you pushed your management to improve their numbers regardless of your human clients, they did it and now you're blaming it on them as a mistake due to the bad PR.

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