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.
Questions people ask
- Do you have to pay for Slack after a free trial?
- No. Slack's Free plan is $0 and its pricing page calls it “free forever” — it is not a trial, and nothing bills if you stay on it. Read on 23 Oct 2026, the page offers no free trial of Pro at all. What it offers instead is 50% off monthly Pro and Business+ for three months ($4.38 and $9 per user a month) to teams that buy online within 7 days of creating the team; the offer does not apply to annual plans.
- How many users can you have on Slack's free plan?
- Slack's pricing page sets no user limit on Free (read 23 Oct 2026), so a whole team can join. The limits sit elsewhere: messages are saved and searchable for 90 days, up to 10 apps, huddles are one-to-one only, and the plan covers one workspace. Pro is $8.75 per user a month, or $7.25 billed annually.
- Is Slack free for a workplace?
- Yes — Free is not restricted to personal use, and the pricing page lists no user cap. Most workplaces outgrow it on history rather than headcount: anything older than 90 days stops being searchable, and group huddles need a paid plan. Business+ is $18 per user a month, or $15 billed annually.
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 2026-10-23 — 4 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.