The Switch We Don’t Control: Hack Club being extorted by Slack • Deployor

I’m deployor. I don’t speak for HQ, im just a 16 year old HackClubber (part of the community). HackClub is a huge nonprofit, rewarding teens for coding, and providing a huge community to them! I’m writing down what it felt like to be inside Hack Club for a week where our home almost vanished—until it didn’t—and why I’m still uneasy even with the best possible ending. I dont work for HC even though i often use the word “we,” since i am part of the community.

0) The mood before the storm

We live on Slack. Our friendships, our hacks, our club launches, our goofy late‑night threads—years of it. It’s the place where “I have an idea” can turn into a working thing by dinner. None of us wake up thinking, “I hope our house still exists tomorrow.”

Then we did.

1) Shock (Sep 15–17): “pay now or lose your history”

Sep 15 — Salesforce/Slack contacts Hack Club about pricing changes.
Sep 17 — Zach posts publicly: after 11 years, Slack called and said we needed to pay $50,000 this week and $200,000/year going forward or be de‑activated—including message history. We’d signed a contract in May for $5k/year, what we paid for a while, happily. The notice window? Basically two working days. Two days to get our data out.

The line that stuck a knife in my stomach:

“Many of us have years of DMs, friendships built, and memories created and preserved on Slack—all of which the sales team is now holding hostage to extort more money from Hack Club, a small charity.”

People were in shock. The plan was self‑hosted Mattermost, fast.

2) Scramble (Sep 17): “we’re migrating”

Channels lit up:

#goodbye-slack and forks of mattermost spun up.
FAQs appeared.
Why Mattermost? Because it was the most mature self‑hostable option that didn’t require inventing a platform from scratch. And the only thing that worked at our scale, more than 40 million messages.
How do we migrate DMs? Early sketches: sign in with Slack, let a tool fetch your data; a site like migrate.hackclub.com
How can I help? “Tell people. Test. Contribute. Expect GitHub, DNS”

We had a date Sep 22 (Slack’s deadline). It felt like packing a whole school into boxes over a weekend. I can only guess how much chaos there was at HQ. And how everyone tried their best.

2.5) The open door that suddenly appeared

In that scramble, something else lit up in my head—and in a lot of others’ too:

If we moved, we’d stop being just a customer and become maintainers/citizens.
We could fork Mattermost (call it “Hackermost”) which we did, upstream improvements, and help them grow like crazy.
Overnight, you’d have thousands of teen contributors filing PRs, building plugins, writing docs, hardening moderation tools, improving onboarding.
We could lead a movement: encourage teens (and other communities) to be independent of SaaS, to understand the stack they live on, to fix it when it breaks.
Heck, we could even host other communities on our servers, like how HCB hosts banking for clubs and non-profits, be a shelter for groups getting squeezed by Slack and other platforms. Like, think of it, HC had such a huge oppertunity.
The ripple effect? If Hack Club moves, others follow. Our choice teaches. Our choice changes things.

Who could say no to that? For a minute there, it felt like we were standing in a doorway to a more open internet, with a line of friends behind us saying, “If you go, we’ll go.”

3) Noise (Sep 17–18): the internet hears, the thread explodes

A blog post by a teen (mahad) in the community went viral on Hacker News. The thread got huge, with real‑world consequences. Suddenly, executives were paying attention.

Was that the “plan”? No. It was more like: speak the truth plainly, and let the internet be the internet. But it mattered. The pressure changed the incentives. They appologizes on Reddit, the CEO responded in the HN post with 3k points. A post on X by one of our board members.

4) Reversal (Sep 18): the call and the pivot

Zach and Christina spoke with Denise Dresser (Slack CEO). She apologized, said it was a mistake. She offered Enterprise+ for 5 years. She said she’d show up in person at a Hack Club event this fall. HQ shared the update:

History safe.
Bots safe.
New doors open: special OAuth/onboarding flow, better admin/moderation APIs, fewer hoops for shipping cool stuff.

I could breathe for the first time in two days.

5) Whiplash (hours later): from “we’re evicted” to “we’re VIP”

This part is hard to describe if you weren’t there. Twelve hours prior: rage and packing. Now: cheers and Enterprise+. I felt both.

Relief.
Gratitude.
We praise Slack and the Enterprise+ plan for making our lives easier. We actually built bots before to imitate read-only channels because the Pro plan didn’t offer this feature. We relied on unofficial APIs to admin 20,000+ teenagers.
And also a pit in my stomach: This was a save. Saves are good. Saves are not the same as “our values are aligned” though-

6) Thoughts

People worried: “Enterprise+ kicks the can five years. Then what?”
We’re more locked‑in than we were.
Whatever Slack does, we need to take. Whatever Salesforce does, we may get harmed by.
We’re a tool in their PR and sales calculus.

I also thought about exports. We actually can export almost everything now (even DMs) because Slack gave us Enterprise+. that wasnt possible before. If we choose to and build the path to a self hosted plafrom, that’s work, and engineering. But also opens so many oppertunities.

And then there was the bigger cultural question:

Do we really want to teach tens of thousands of teens that their community lives on a closed SaaS with a sales culture that is so scary?

Or are we trying to raise hackers- people who can build and run the places they hang out?

It’s impact, not just moral. What HackClub normalizes is what the teens in our community normalize.

7) The good ending (for now): Enterprise+ and a quiet Slack

Practically, this is the best outcome:

no data loss,
no frantic re‑platforming,
better tooling for us to build with,

I’m grateful, i really am. I’m also keeping receipts from this though.

8) What I refuse to forget

A whole sales/billing motion put us on a timer. Even if it was a mistake, putting any workspace on a two-working-day timer is crazy. The fact that this is a sales tactic they would use against anyone is scary and almost feels like blackmail. It’s certainly not fair. And this wasn’t unique to us. Other large open communities (like the Kubernetes Slack) have reported being put under similar pressure. The fact they would do this to anyone is just disgusting.
Public pressure flipped the story, others might not have that.
A different department offered a generous save.
All of those things are true inside the same company.
That we were not saved because Slack likes us, but because it is best for them.

This doesn’t read like “Slack loves Hack Club.” It reads like “Slack is a giant SaaS run by many teams with different incentives; we were almost crushed by one and rescued by another because the optics changed. We are a tool to make teens use Slack.”

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s how big orgs work.

9) Stability vs. values (the knot I can’t untie)

Two truths I’m holding:

Stability is oxygen. We are teenagers shipping ambitious things. “Let’s rebuild a chat platform and run it 24/7/365” would eat the exact time we should spend mentoring, building clubs, teaching, and shipping silly experiments that make us fall in love with computers. Handing off stability to slack helps us focus.
Lock‑in is gravity. Enterprise+ is a gift and a deeper well. The features we adopt, the OAuth we normalize, the workflows we weave into our culture, all of it raises the cost of leaving. When the five‑year window closes, we might get more generosity. We might not. Conditions can change. Our choice today makes that future either survivable or catastrophic. But from then going back to a lower plan is nearly impossible.

Put differently:

We got safety. We also taught everyone that our safety lives under a switch we do not control.

10) Teens, imprinting, and the “tool” feeling

I keep asking: What are we teaching by where we live?

If we keep living on Slack, we teach Slack—habits, APIs, mental models, hackclubbers made hundreds of bots.
If we move everything to “our own thing,” we teach responsibility and ownership, but we also teach being on call and fighting infra instead of building clubs and friendships. The cost lands on… also us (teens, volunteers, overworked staff).

So I’m not saying “move now.” I’m saying “don’t forget this.”

Because the feeling—that lurch when a sales org can erase your house—is the exact reason people build alternatives in the first place.

11) Where I land (still just an opinion)

Thank you to everyone who de‑escalated this into a good ending.
I support staying on Enterprise+ for now, simply for the stability it gives us.
I don’t worship the donor. A save is not sainthood.
I won’t memory‑hole that a different department nearly wiped us, and even would exort any buisness.
I believe we should keep light‑touch experiments alive (skills, scripts, exports, bridges), not as a plan. We should not move because we have to, we should move because it fits us more.

And yes, we are a tool to Salesforce—one that’s occasionally valuable for PR, sometimes inconvenient for cost, and always subject to changing conditions.

12) Epilogue: fragments I’m saving for future me

“It couldn’t take more than two years to migrate.” Maybe. But only if we start by proving we can move anything cleanly. Future certainty doesn’t grow out of present neglect.
“We can figure out dependence later.” We said that yesterday too.
“Isn’t Slack just better?” Often, yes. That’s the point. Better makes gravity heavier.
“Do we really need to be against Slack?” No. I’m not. I’m for remembering who owns the switch. I dont hate Slack as a software.

Appendix A — rough chronology (as it felt)

Sep 15 — Slack reaches out about pricing changes.
Sep 17 (AM) — Public post: pay $50k this week + $200k/yr going forward or get shut down (incl. history). We start packing.
Sep 17 (PM) — Migration channels/FAQ spin up; Mattermost chosen; ideas for DM export (HQ does public, members opt‑in for DMs).
Sep 17–18 — A teen blog post + HN meltdown. The internet looks. Executives look.
Sep 18 — Call with Slack CEO. Enterprise+ for 5 years. Apology. Promise to show up at an event. Everyone exhales.
Sep 18–19 — Meta threads (after the pivot): costs, MAU counts, “we’ll figure it out later,” “we should still experiment,” “don’t let this fade,” “stability vs. values,” “teens + SaaS imprinting,” “we’re a tool,” “we’re grateful,” “I’m scared we’ll forget,” and the open‑platform dream many of us started sketching in their head.

That’s the week.

Closing

I’m happy we didn’t lose our home. I’m also going to remember exactly how it was saved, and by whom, and why. Because gratitude without memory is how you drift into the same cliff twice. And because the open door is still there, waiting for someone brave (and rested) enough to walk through it.

Mahad also deserves huge credit for his blog post about this, which received a lot of attention on Hacker News.

-deployor