It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.
The OP sounds very entitled: "We'd endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media."
Of course Slack must provide them with free chat rooms in perpetuity, they've even been mentioned in interviews!
It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.
I really don't think Slack cares about one customer mentioning them in interviews. Especially a freeloading customer. Why not simply have each user pay their own $5 per month?
They are not customers they are users, and it's important to make sure your users are happy, lest you run out of them before you run out of money catering to their every whim.
This whole concept of a 'customer' sounds very interesting, I hear they appreciate the services companies provide so much that they are willing to hand over actual money, instead of using the service they got for free to bitch about the service they got for free.
> It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.
Agreed. This is more or less an example of patio11's "pathological customer": they won't or lack the resources to pay, have an unreasonable use case and overinflated expectations, and proceed to throw a fit loudly and publicly when they don't get their way.
You realize that this one example actually proves the rule, no? In order for the math to work out in this instance you need a large, tech-focused community that might one day turn into a workforce of engineers that might then bring their Slack preference into new companies. At which point assuming the company isn't already using Slack, which is a very big IFF, you then hope that the coder builds enough clout in the company to evangelize Slack and convince the company to move off of whatever they are currently using.
If I were Slack I would generate migration assistants to get organizations like this OFF of Slack and on to something like Gitter ASAP. Seems like the return on that investment (in purely good will) would be much more predictable and scalable.
Also, frankly, if I were Slack I would not invest in supporting this use case at all. Massive free chat rooms are not a profitable space to be in.