[blueplanet200]

Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake.

While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.

[seamanrob]

I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!

In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.

[jrflowers]

Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.

If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.

[Mawr]

Yeah, I don't care about some non-profit or whatever. I care that the company thinks it's a-okay to demand from their customers 10x their yearly bill on the spot and to commit to 4x that yearly or else their data will be deleted in a few days. That's not an employee acting out of band, it's obviously their modus operandi.

[seamanrob]

Zach has posted separately about Hack Club continuing on Slack. In general, customers can export their data and the options for that by our various subscription plans are here: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp....

[samtp]

So if they want to export all of their data they might have to pay you more money to do so? How exactly does that seem fair when they don't agree to the existing price increase?

[nirushiv]

Good to know this!

[buran77]

> an oversight in our billing process

So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.

There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.

[throwaway0236]

> So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice

I think this is the most important finding from this story. It's not that someone has mistakenly billed a non-profit, but that this form of "customer relations" is apparently part of the standard billing process for business customers.

They are free to do so of course, but I imagine that this may impact customer retention if the practice continues. This short notice is something that I would have reacted very strongly about if I had integrated Slack so deeply in my business as the OP did. With the push for workflows, agents and additional functionality, it is actually a huge risk to the business if you get a short notice to migrate if the new terms can not be met.

[kaoD]

What I miss from these sort of apologies is an actual postmortem like the one we'd have for a software bug.

What was this oversight? What caused it? What are you exactly doing to prevent it from happening in the future?

[lucideer]

> I cannot guarantee

You mean you won't guarantee. You could guarantee this if you invested in customer service. Choosing not to do so is a choice.

[bobdvb]

Is that a good advert for Salesforce?

[jama211]

The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.

[Barbing]

No guarantees needed (and good on ya for this fix)!

Def do encourage the post mortem with root-cause analysis & robust corrective action plan. Thanks for being here.