Is Slack free? What it actually costs in 2026
Slack's free plan still exists, but since September 2022 it hides your history after 90 days — which for most teams is the same thing as not being free.
Free gives unlimited users and channels, but only 90 days of message history, 10 app integrations, and huddles restricted to one-to-one.
Slack replaced the free plan's 10,000-message searchable limit with a 90-day time window, and raised Pro pricing at the same time.
The old limit rewarded low-volume teams; the new one penalises long-lived ones regardless of volume. It converted the free plan from a viable permanent tier into a trial with no end date, and it is the single largest driver of self-hosted chat adoption since.
What the free tier actually includes
- 90 days of message history — older messages become inaccessible, not deleted
- Up to 10 apps or integrations
- Huddles limited to 1:1 — no group audio or video
- No workflow builder, no SSO
Where the wall is
History, and it is a wall that gets worse the longer you stay. Slack does not delete the messages; it stops showing them to you, and they return if you ever pay. That asymmetry is the entire commercial design: the longer a team uses the free plan, the more of its own institutional memory sits behind the paywall, and the harder leaving becomes. A team two years in has 21 months of invisible decisions.
After that: Pro is $8.75 per user per month, or $7.25 billed annually. Business+ is $18 monthly, $15 annually. For a 20-person team that is roughly $1,740 a year to read messages you already wrote.
Can you self-host Slack? Yes
Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are the mature self-hosted answers and both keep history permanently by default, because there is no commercial reason for them not to. Zulip is the interesting third option — its threading model is genuinely better for asynchronous teams rather than merely cheaper. Migration tooling for Slack exports exists in all three.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting Mattermost
Self-hosting Rocket.Chat
Self-hosting Zulip
What you are locked into
Cloud-only hosting and per-seat billing; your history and integrations sit on Salesforce's terms.
If you would rather not pay: Mattermost
Mattermost
Self-hosted team chat built for security-conscious orgs.
Free self-host; paid Enterprise
See all 3 Slack alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Salesforce's own pricing and documentation on 2026-08-28 — 15 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.