Cut Me Some Slack, Slack (Premium)

I’ve long intended to write an article about money in the Behind Thurrott.com series, and I will someday. But doing so is complicated in part because we still don’t have a clear understanding of the full financial picture of the site. Money comes in and money goes out, of course. But even now, 8 months after I became the publication’s sole owner, we still hit occasional snags in the form of unexpected bills.

Hopefully, most of you aren’t as dense as I am when it comes to this kind of thing, but even I understand that this site has both monthly and annual expenses and that these things need to be budgeted and, ideally, predictable. And to help us with this part of the business, George and his accountant prepared a list of the expected expenses on both schedules heading into this transition.

It all sounds easy, or at least straightforward … but it often isn’t. And things change. Services we pay for change hands, rebrand, become more expensive, or whatever.  We did what we could proactively to minimize our expenses, working with Robert, the guru who handles our backend web development to shift from expensive AWS-based hosting to a much more reasonable solution with no performance penalties. And we’ve had to adopt new services for any variety of reasons. Our newsletter partners use Slack, as does Robert and his team of developers. And so we have had to adopt Slack.

Ah, Slack.

Slack is a good example of something that seems straightforward but is not. If you’re not familiar with this, you can visit the Slack website and discover that this “productivity platform,” this chat-based collaboration solution (as I think of it) comes in both free and paid versions. That the free version is limited to 1:1 “huddles” (ugh) with people inside or outside your organization only, and that a huddle is basically a “conversation” or a “chat” in similar solutions like Microsoft Teams.

And … fine. But this limitation is a problem for us because Robert and his team, and JR Raphael and the folks at Windows Intelligence, are both obviously outside our organization. Meaning, I have to pay for Slack.

And Slack Pro is actually pretty expensive given the benefits to me: For $7.25 per user per month (when you pay for a full year at once, so $87 per user per year), you get a variety of additional features, including the crucial ability to “huddle” (God, I f#$%ing hate that word) with more than a single person inside or outside of our organization. By comparison, our Google Workspace Business Starter accounts are only $6 per user per month, or $72 per year. As is my Microsoft 365 Basic account. And these accounts provide many, many more features than does Slack.

But Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 share other similarities. You can upgrade an account to get significant additional benefits, for starters: A Google Workspace Business Standard account gets 2 TB of storage vs. 30 GB for $12 per month, for example, while a Microsoft 365 Business Standard account gets the desktop office apps and other perks for $12.50 per month. As important, these account types are transparent when it comes to billing. You know what you pay, when you pay, and what you get. And when you change the account type/tier, you do so yourself, explicitly, as the business owner or manager. Google and Microsoft don’t change it for you, automatically, without warning you or telling you.

This is not what Slack is like. At all.

When we started using Slack, we had to consider the makeup of our organization, meaning Thurrott.com. Who is in this organization? Or, put another way, how many Slack subscriptions do we—really, I—have to pay for? Well, we need one for me, of course. And because my wife Stephanie is involved with the financial stuff, especially, she’s a second subscription. And then there’s Laurent. Laurent doesn’t deal with the Windows Intelligence guys directly, but he does interact with Robert and that team. And he interacts with me and Stephanie too, internally. Or, I should say, he does now.

Prior to last month, we had been using Microsoft Teams for a variety of things. I mean “we” broadly: Brad and I used it each morning to connect and then record First Ring Daily. Laurent and I used it to chat each day. Laurent and I also used it to communicate with our former owner and coworkers (and friends, really) at BWW Media Group. Which was a little wrinkle I knew I’d have to address eventually. You see, the previous owner, George, pays for the three Microsoft 365 accounts (Brad’s, Laurent’s, and mine) we just kept using over the past several months without a care in the world. This is yet another example of the kind of person that George is. But I always knew this largess would have to end eventually. And last month he and I started discussing this part of our separation schedule. And I approached Brad and Laurent separately to figure out our respective next steps.

I also had an ulterior motive here: I wanted to reduce the number of messaging/collaboration services I use while also changing how I use them to be more efficient. These things are both part of a bigger workflow discussion that we’ll have later—it’s almost a digital decluttering topic, when you think about it—but for now, I’ll just say that instead of pinning all these apps to all the Taskbars across the computers I use, I wanted to be smarter about being notified when people reach out to me but without the clutter. More on that soon, I think.

Anyway, for First Ring Daily, Brad I agreed on switching to Zoom: My wife and I have recorded over 50 videos over Zoom so far, and Leo and TWiT have been using Zoom for Windows Weekly and their other podcasts for years. And that experience proved to me that this service works well over time, much better than Teams ever did for video recording purposes. Brad saw this for himself when we quietly switched over without telling anyone: The video quality of First Ring Daily has gone up since the change.

OK, one down.

I laid out a few options for Laurent. We’re already paying for Google Workspace so I guess we could use Google Meet or whatever it is that Google has. We could use Skype, maybe, but that is one of the services I’m trying to expunge. Or we could use Slack, since we pay for it anyway because we use it with two external partners already, and if his account had to be a paid subscription, I would of course pay for that too. (Still. $87 x 3 is $261 per year, and some or most of that seems unnecessary given the other ways in which we can chat using solutions we’re already paying for, etc.) It wasn’t clear how I could even pay for Laurent’s Slack account since he had it himself before this. But we’d figure that out if and when we had to. So we chose Slack.

And then Slack committed what, to me, is an unforgivable sin. It charged me a lot of money, out of the blue, with no prior warning and, at the time of the charge, no explanation of why.

Every morning, I wake up and go through a pretty consistent routine that involves a first hour in which I read the news, drink a single cup of coffee, and then quickly scan whatever email came in overnight. My wife and I then head out for our morning walk—about 40 minutes each day when we’re at home—and we get back in time for Brad and I to record First Ring Daily. And I gotta tell you, the past several months have been a bit unsettling on the email front because there is this whole new list of responsibilities I have to deal with, from customer service requests on the site to all those bills, some known some not, that seem to come in far more often than is needed. And on October 31, 2023, I received one of those latter types of emails.

From Slack.

The subject was “Thurrott.com, here’s your monthly summary,” which seemed innocuous enough: Perhaps Slack sends out some kind of regular missive about how my organization uses the service. No worries there.

The body of the email started off, in very large type, with “You’re all set,” which further enforced the feeling that this email was just informational. “Here’s the status of your team’s activity changes for last month,” it continued. “For additional details, see the attached document.”

The … attached document? So I scrolled down further. And that’s when I saw the attachment. This was a bill. And not just some bill for $7.25 or $14.50, as I’d expected given that I assumed I was paying for two accounts (me and Steph). No. It was a bill for $141.60 USD.

What the f#$%ing f#$%. What?

I’m sure I’ve noted this elsewhere, but I doubt myself far too easily. The first thing that went through my mind was that I must have somehow signed up for some higher-end Slack subscription that was much more expensive than the $6 or $7 I vaguely recalled this service costing per user. My second thought—because, seriously, even I am not that stupid—was that this was just a mistake. In fact, $141.60 seemed curiously similar to the ~$14 bill I figured I owed them. What’s a decimal point between friends? I’d contact Slack and ask about the mistake.

But first, I looked at the attached document to see whether it offered any further clues. And what I saw verified my belief that this was a mistake. It noted that my “activity charges” of $133.59 USD were “based on fluctuations in your team’s activity and/or headcount.” The second page expanded on this, telling me that customers “only get billed for what you use. On the Pro plan, the cost per member is $87 USD per year. The prorated price is based on the days remaining in your plan.”

We had one user added on October 6 with a prorated price of $69.41. And another one was added on October 28 with a prorated price of $64.18. Add those up and you get to $133.59. Add $8.02 in taxes and you get the number I first saw in the email.

What?

To my memory, my wife and I have been using Slack since July with our partners, if not earlier. Laurent, too, has been using his own Slack account for free since before then. What on earth could have triggered this now? Those two October dates don’t map to anything.

Well, they don’t map to anything meaningful to me. As noted, I think it terms of month-to-month use, and I think like that because that is how all of Slack’s competitors work.  If I add an account—for Steph, Laurent, or anyone else—to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 commercial, guess what? I start getting billed. Each month, actually. And that’s true whether I choose a monthly or annual plan. Yes, there are pros and cons to that. But you can also easily move subscriptions from account to account. So if Laurent were to leave someday, I could simply move his license to another account if I was on an annual plan.

Not on Slack. This company’s billing scheme is hypocritically and/or ironically called “Fair Billing,” and while you can read all about it on the Slack website, it’s mostly just fair for Slack. From what I can tell, they’re really proud of it. But from my perspective, this style of billing is the opposite of what I want. It’s not transparent or obvious. It’s not predictable. And as noted, the company never indicated in any way, shape, or form, that some amount of usage against my organization, from two separate users, would suddenly trigger a bill at this random date. This came out of nowhere, with no warning or explanation.

According to the policy, I’m billed for “active” members, which are defined as workspace owners (me), workspace admins (still me), full members, and multi-channel guests. As I write this, I still have no idea what a full member or multi-channel guest is. But that’s because I got stuck on Slack’s policy for refunding me if an active member becomes inactive. Put simply, they do not refund me. They give me Slack credits. Which are based on the same prorated math I saw in the bill.

I understand all the basics of the money here. That there are choices to be made between annual and monthly costs and all that. What I don’t understand is the timing of this bill or even which users I am being billed for. And so I asked. And to its credit, Slack responded that same day and explained where I could go to learn the details. Information that a) should have arrived before I was billed and b) should have been included in the bill. And there were the dates and the details. Laurent and I joined in June, Laurent suddenly was designed as active on October 6, and my wife became a regular account in my workspace on October 27. Again, I feel like those status changes should have triggered a warning. Not an annual charge for both accounts.

I wrote Slack back again and explained these issues. It waited six days and only confirmed one of my questions, that “there will be no additional charges as long as no other user becomes active in your workspace before the end of your current billing cycle.” Which isn’t exactly what I want. Nor does it address my biggest concerns. I want a refund, for starters.

For now, I’ve removed the only payment method I’ve associated with Slack. I’ve confirmed that I previously asked Slack to “send email notifications as billing changes occur (at most once per day)” but never received any until last week. I viewed a history showing one charge in July and then nothing until October despite the interim activity. And now I am going to do what I can do to limit our use of this service going forward.

Going forward, there will be less Slack. I’m going to cut myself some Slack, if you will.