Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase

I used to think slack was a cool alternative to teams until I joined an actual slack channel and was bombarded with premium subscription walls everywhere.

Always go open source, always go self hosted. Chats are one of the easiest and cheapest servers to run.

Could you imagine if some of the people who fall for these SaaS corporate apps just contributed like 1/10th the amount to open source projects that can be self hosted from the start instead of having to get screwed over first before they realize the risk they are taking "trusting" some for profit corp to not extort them at some future point.

Nice choice, deciding to move.
Even better, since Hack Club is a coding related organisation, they can also consider making little projects to contribute code to Mattermost itself, that they use. It ends up being a win for both.

Mattermost free version works well as an alternative

The place I work for is on the hook for $800k per year increase from Microsoft unless we can get creative with licensing. My boss keeps complaining that other companies skirting the rules forced Microsoft to do this. It's tough to keep my mouth shut.

I'm glad the company in the article is able to migrate. Sadly we're in way too deep to escape, and management seems unable to imagine anything but being dependent on abusive mega-corps.

Number must go up.

FAFO, learn how to run nodeBB