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Comment by AdieuToLogic | 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 ...

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com