Do you know who pays for the Mac Admins Slack?
Chris Dawe, co-chair of the Mac Admins Foundation (MAF), told that story at the MacAdmins Conference in July. A friend asked him the question, and he was happy to say he did know. I suspect most of the 85,000 accounts in the Slack could not say the same.
This weekend, the Mac Admins Slack moves to Slack’s Enterprise plan. It goes offline on Friday, October 9 at 8:30 p.m. Pacific, and Slack estimates about 18 hours of downtime. I want to be clear up front: I think we should go ahead with the migration. The volunteer admin team needs better moderation tools, and the board did real work to get here.
Some disclosure. I am a member of the Mac Admins Slack. I do not serve on the board or on the admin team. I spoke with board members at the conference in July, and the questions in this post are the ones I did not know to ask at the time.
My concern is year six. As Mac Admins, we make a living ensuring there is a contingency plan. We escrow recovery keys, we test restores, and we ask every vendor how we get our data out. Our own community now has a five-year price agreement with a single vendor, and no published plan for what comes after it.
Here is how we got here, what we know, and what I think we should ask for.
We Have Moved Before
Before 2015, Mac Admins kept in touch through mailing lists, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and Twitter. As Chris Dawe put it in 2024, some of us relied on email, some on IRC, and some used Twitter. For me, the Mac Admins mailing list is where I made many of my first connections, and I lurked on the IRC channels. Tom Bridge’s IRC Guide still resides out on AFP548.
Then, on May 12, 2015, Sabrina (Bri) Coy and Kitzy fired up a free Slack account to talk about Apple IT topics with friends. It had nearly 100 users within weeks and more than 5,000 active accounts by June 2016.
Nobody planned that move. People drifted, and drifting cost nothing. There was no archive to leave behind, no bill, and no agreement.
It did not stay free. Armin Briegel’s guide to the Mac Admins Slack notes that it started as an “employee-sponsored instance” before the foundation began funding it in 2022. I also recall a stretch when the instance was frozen until it was settled who would pay for it. An Addigy anniversary webinar recalls the same thing: a couple of weeks when nobody could log in.
If my memory and theirs are right, we have already lost access once over who pays.
Today the picture is different. Eleven years of history, 1,449 public channels, a six-figure annual bill, and a multi-year agreement. The next move will not be cheap, so it should not be improvised.
How the Slack Is Paid For
MAF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in 2021 to take fiscal responsibility for the Mac Admins Slack. Volunteers run it entirely, and its Form 990 filings show no paid officers. As of July, the board had seven of nine seats filled, and the admin and moderator team was down to nine people. In September, they welcomed two new board members, filling all nine seats.
The foundation also made an early commitment that the Slack should remain free to all comers. Our community includes people at Bay Area companies and people at rural school districts. I think that is the right commitment.
Here is what the board shared in July:
| Item | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Slack accounts | 85,241 | 23:26 |
| Monthly active users | 9,000 to 12,000 | 02:55 |
| Annual Slack cost on the legacy Business+ plan | About $125,000 to $130,000 | 24:57 |
| Conference and speaker grants this year | Almost $30,000 | 04:19 |
| Grants over the life of the program | Almost $100,000 | 04:27 |
| Who funds it | 10 major sponsors, 13 supporting sponsors, and 200+ individual donors | 33:31 |
Two things stand out to me.
First, Slack bills on active users, not total accounts. The 85,000 number doesn’t drive the cost.
Second, one year of Slack on the old plan cost more than every grant the foundation has ever awarded. That is not a criticism of the grants program. It shows where the money has to go first.
Nearly all of that money is donated. Contributions made up 99% of the foundation’s revenue in its 2024 filing.
What Members Cannot See
The foundation is not hiding its books. Its Form 990 filings for 2022 through 2024 are public. What is missing is specific:
- The new price. It has not been stated. We were told the price was going up no matter what, and that every option cost more than what we paid before.
- The term. The talk described “a five-year price agreement locked in.” MAF has not said publicly whether that commits the foundation for five years, or whether it can leave earlier. Neither the announcement nor the migration FAQ addresses it.
- Future disclosure. A monthly donor asked whether the budget could be made more visible. The answer was that, because of the relationship with Salesforce, the foundation “may have to be a little bit more abstract” about that in the future. The foundation’s home page says, “We keep our books open.” I would like to understand how those two statements fit together.
- A gap I cannot explain. The 2024 filing reports $54,395 for all information technology, out of $172,120 in total expenses. The July talk cited about $125,000 per year for Slack alone. That may be contract timing, prepaid expenses, or a price increase at the last renewal. I do not know, and I would rather not guess.
A Rough Estimate, Labeled as One
In that same answer, Chris suggested a starting point: take the published 85% nonprofit discount, the monthly active user count, and a pricing tier. So I did.
- Business+ lists at $15 per user per month, billed annually.
- Slack for Nonprofits takes 85% off, which leaves $2.25 per user per month.
- At 9,000 to 12,000 monthly active users, that is $243,000 to $324,000 per year.
For comparison, $125,000 per year works out to roughly $0.87 to $1.16 per active user per month. The legacy deal was already better than the standard discount.
The negotiated Enterprise price is unknown, and it is presumably lower than my estimate. Still, the foundation’s total revenue in 2024 was $310,885. On the standard path, Slack alone would consume most or all of it.
The Risk Is Not That Slack Disappears
I do not think Slack is going away. The realistic risk is the renewal conversation in year five. Consider what the talk told us about our position:
- Salesforce retired the plan we were on. We did not choose to move. The tier was removed.
- As Chris relayed the vendor’s position, the amount we pay “will probably substantially go up one way or another, no matter what you do.”
- The Salesforce account team generated the options the board reviewed. The talk did not mention evaluating any platform other than Slack.
- The platform already sets terms for us. According to the migration FAQ, the Enterprise plan has no public invite link, so new members will request an invitation through a form. Slack’s AI features are on by default. The foundation has kept them off, is reviewing which to disable, and has asked Slack to exclude our data from its global models.
I appreciate that the board is on top of that last one. My point is that we are the ones asking.
None of this is a complaint about the account team, who, by Chris’s account, advocated hard for us. It is a description of leverage. In five years, MAF sits down to negotiate with sixteen years of community history on the other side of the table, and no alternative in hand.
“We Go Where the Community Is”
What I heard in the hallway track in July was that the foundation goes where the community is, and the community is on Slack. If the community shifts, the foundation will follow.
I understand the humility in that. I also think it is circular. The foundation pays for the space, the join link on macadmins.org points to it, and the archive lives there. The community cannot drift somewhere else without leaving all of that behind.
In 2015, drifting was free. Today, the only realistic shift is forced: a price we cannot meet, terms we cannot accept, or a change in ownership. A forced move without a plan is what splinters a community.
The Board’s Case
I want to make the board’s case as well as I can, because it is a good one.
- People are the constraint, not money. The foundation has run a surplus in each year it has filed, and it ended 2024 with about $285,000 in cash. What it lacks is hours. The board’s advisor put it this way: volunteers giving 8 hours a week run at 20% of the speed of full-time staff. The board hit pause in April to avoid burnout. Last year, 30 to 40 moderator applications sat unprocessed.
- Enterprise solves real problems. On the old plan, code of conduct investigations meant volunteers had to ingest and process log data by hand. The Enterprise plan brings moderation, visibility, and support that the admin team has gone without.
- A price lock is worth something. Five years of predictable cost gives the foundation a long runway to build its fundraising.
- Nothing is lost in the move. Channels, history, direct messages, and files all carry over.
- The work is being done properly. The foundation hired a consultant for the migration because it was not something to leave to volunteers.
The honest reading is that “move everything to an open-source platform” would land on exactly the people who are already at their limit. I am not asking for that.
Why Open Source Deserves an Evaluation
It seems odd to me that a community with its own open source organization runs its home on a closed platform. I will admit that is not much of an argument by itself. We manage a proprietary operating system with largely proprietary tools, and a hosted open-source product is still a vendor.
The argument that holds up is exit cost. With an open-source platform, the data format is open and the export is ours. If the host changes its terms, we can move to another host or run it ourselves.
That maps directly onto the foundation’s mission, which includes “preserving collected knowledge for the benefit of others” and “protecting the independence of the community.” In 2024, Chris wrote of a community “that stands on its own, beholden only to itself.” I agree with that goal. A single-vendor dependency with no exit plan conflicts with it.
There is a precedent from the IRC days. In May 2021, most of Freenode’s volunteer staff resigned after a change in control and started Libera Chat. Because IRC is an open protocol, communities could follow them without losing their tools.
The costs are real, and I want to state them plainly:
- Hosting. Someone pays for servers or for a hosted plan.
- Operations. Someone patches, monitors, and restores, and that person is a volunteer.
- Security. MAF would carry more of the liability for 85,000 accounts.
- Moderation tooling. Any alternative has to match what the admin team is getting from Enterprise.
- Attrition. Some share of those 9,000 to 12,000 monthly users would not follow.
An honest evaluation may conclude Slack is still the right answer. That would be a fine outcome. The point is to have looked. I do not have a preferred platform, and I am deliberately not naming one.
The Ask and the Offer
I have three requests for the board:
- Publish the shape of the agreement. Is the five-year agreement a commitment or a price ceiling? What are the exit terms? I understand the price itself may be confidential. Members need the term and exit terms for planning.
- Set a decision date. Pick a date well before year five, and commit to deciding by then whether to renew or move, with an evaluation in hand.
- Hold our own exports. If possible, keep a regular export of the community’s public history, stored by MAF outside of Slack, on a published schedule.
I also have a proposal: a member-staffed working group with a written charter and one deliverable. That deliverable is a platform evaluation and exit plan. It is not a migration.
From the board, the group would need three things:
- One board liaison.
- The requirements list: moderation, audit, privacy, accessibility, and anything else an alternative must match.
- Whatever can be shared about the exit terms.
In July, Chris said the foundation has struggled to integrate non-board volunteers and is recommitting. “Let us put you to work,” he said. A scoped project with a single deliverable seems like a reasonable place to start.
I am volunteering for it. I can commit 8 hours per month until the next Mac Admins Conference.
Conclusion
The migration will happen this weekend, and I hope it goes smoothly. Thank you to the board, the admin team, and everyone giving up a weekend for it.
Year six will arrive whether we plan for it or not. None of us would accept “we will figure it out when the contract ends” from a vendor, and we would not accept it from ourselves at work. Our own community deserves the same care.
In the meantime, there are things every member can do today:
- Donate. If the Slack has helped you do your job, chip in.
- Ask your vendors and your employer. John Mahlman, who runs fundraising for the foundation, made the case that a simple ask to a vendor you already work with can turn into a sponsorship.
- Volunteer. The board has asked for help, and it means it.
I would love to hear from you. Did you know how the Mac Admins Slack is funded? What would you want to see in an exit plan? Would you serve on a working group?
References
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Bridge, T. (2025). Celebrating Ten Years of Mac Admins This May!, from https://macadmins.org/news/2025/04/celebrating-ten-years-of-mac-admins-this-may/
Bridge, T. (2013). A Field Guide to IRC, from https://www.afp548.com/2013/02/06/a-field-guide-to-irc/
Briegel, A. (2023). MacAdmins Slack: a highly opinionated guide (2023), from https://scriptingosx.com/2023/05/macadmins-slack-a-highly-opinionated-guide-2023/
Dawe, C. (2024). A Special Announcement, and a Special Thanks, from https://macadmins.org/news/2024/03/a-special-announcement-and-a-special-thanks/
Dawe, C., & Blake, S. (2026). Mac Admins Foundation Action News [Video]. MacAdmins Conference, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzP1EDagT9Y (session listing: https://psumac2026.sched.com/event/2QBf3/mac-admins-foundation-action-news)
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Iaconelli, D. (2026). Save the Date: Mac Admins Slack is Moving to Enterprise Grid!, from https://macadmins.org/news/2026/09/mac-admins-slack-is-moving-to-enterprise-grid/
Mac Admins Foundation. (2026). Mac Admins Foundation Welcomes Two New Board Members https://macadmins.org/news/2026/09/mac-admins-foundation-welcomes-two-new-board-members/
Mac Admins Foundation. (2026). Slack Migration FAQ, from https://macadmins.org/community/slack-migration-faq/
Mac Admins Foundation. (n.d.). Our Mission, from https://macadmins.org/about/mission/
philanthropy.org. (n.d.). Mac Admins Foundation: Form 990, FY2024, from https://philanthropy.org/990/report/872718351/mac-admins-foundation
ProPublica. (n.d.). Mac Admins Foundation, Nonprofit Explorer, from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/872718351
Slack. (n.d.). Apply for the Slack for Nonprofits discount, from https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833
The Register. (2021, May 19). Report on the Freenode staff resignations, from https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/freenode_staff_resigns/