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Slack Technologies, LLC (formerly Tiny Speck), is an American software company founded in 2009. they are known for their popular messaging and collaboration platform Slack, catering to organizations and businesses. Slack Technologies, LLC was acquired by the business-oriented CRM software company Salesforce, Inc in 2021. Slack claims to have more than 200,000 paying customers,[1] is used by more than three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies,[1] and offers a messaging platform tailored to government agencies through an instance called GovSlack.

Slack
Basic information
Founded 2009
Legal Structure Public
Industry Communications, Collaborative software
Also known as
Official website https://slack.com/

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

  • User Freedom
  • User Privacy
  • Business Model
  • Market Control

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Incidents

This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Slack category.

Unannounced fee increase on nonprofit Hack Club (September 2025)

Hack Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization for teens interested in acquiring or developing functional coding skills.

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[2] 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[3] 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.

Resolution of Hack Club's fee increase

CEO Denise Dresser replied[3] to the Hacker News forum post with an apology, stating the increase was a billing error. Kalam later updated his personal blog post to state that the issue had been resolved and Hack Club had accepted a more favorable deal offered by Slack as a remedy. He stated that Hack Club would also pursue other avenues of owning its own backup data from projects hosted on Slack as a safeguard.

Products

  • Slack

See also

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "About Us". Slack. Archived from the original on 11 Feb 2026. Retrieved 2026-01-13.
  2. Kalam, Mahad (2025-09-18). "Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase". Skyfall.dev. Archived from the original on 2026-01-02. Retrieved 2026-01-13.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Kalam, Mahad (2025-09-18). "Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase". Hacker News. Retrieved 2026-01-13.