Slack: Difference between revisions

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Slack is a popular messaging and collaboration platform owned by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software) Slack Technologies, LLC], formerly Tiny Speck, catering to organizations and businesses. Slack Technologies, LLC was acquired by the business-oriented CRM software company [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce Salesforce, Inc] in 2021. Slack claims to have more than 200,000 paying customers,<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=About Us |url=https://slack.com/about |access-date=2026-01-13 |website=Slack}}</ref> be used by more than three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies,<ref name=":1" /> and offers a messaging platform tailored to government agencies through an instance called [https://slack.com/solutions/govslack GovSlack].

On September 18, 2025, the UK-based web developer Mahad Kalam, who serves as the Infra Lead of Hack Club's Newspaper group, made a post<ref>{{Cite web |last=Kalam |first=Mahad |date=2025-09-18 |title=Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase |url=https://skyfall.dev/posts/slack |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20260102215028/https://skyfall.dev/posts/slack |archive-date=2025-09-18 |access-date=2026-01-13 |website=Skyfall.dev}}</ref> on his personal website Skyfall.dev stating that Slack had contacted Hack Club and increased the fee for the organization's Slack workspace from $5,000 per year to $200,000 per year. According to Kalam, Slack threatened to delete Hack Club's message history and deactivate their workspace if Hack Club didn't pay $50,000 within a week and agree to pay $200,000 a year for Slack services moving forward, as well as other fees. Kalam said that Hack Club had been given no prior notice of this fee increase and that the minimal notice had been "catastrophic" for the organization's ongoing projects.

Kalam shared<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |last=Kalam |first=Mahad |date=2025-09-18 |title=Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase |url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887 |access-date=2026-01-13 |website=Hacker News}}</ref> his post to the forum Hacker News, where the information was confirmed by Hack Club co-founder and COO Christina Asquith. Asquith stated that a few months before this incident, Slack had changed the terms of each user's agreement with no notice or updated contract, and that Hack Club had experienced difficulty in reaching Slack support to clarify or fix the resulting billing discrepancy. She confirmed that the $195,000 fee increase came with no more than a week's notice. The Hacker News post gained more than 3,000 points from forum users.