{"id":43879,"date":"2024-06-26T16:08:15","date_gmt":"2024-06-26T20:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=43879"},"modified":"2025-09-24T14:42:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:42:21","slug":"slack-to-delete-old-messages-in-free-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/26\/slack-to-delete-old-messages-in-free-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Slack to Delete Old Messages in Free Accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slack<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Slack will no longer keep messages and files for the lifetime of your free workspace. Starting 26th August 2024, Customer Data – such as messages and file history – older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from workspaces on the free subscription[…]<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If you choose to remain on a free workspace, you’ll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid subscription. If you decide to upgrade, we’ll store messages and files based on your chosen retention period<\/a>, with an option to keep all history.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the last few years, the free plan stored<\/em> older messages but would not let you see them or export links to files<\/ins><\/a><\/em> from them. At this point, you have two months to pay, at least temporarily, if you want to export your data before it’s deleted. Exporting everything (including DMs) requires a Business+ plan at $15\/user\/month.<\/p>\n

I think a lot of people thought that Slack would be like other services and use their enterprise business to subsidize much lower volume free accounts indefinitely. Instead, they are severely limiting the free accounts and pricing out informal communities and even small businesses. True, the search isn’t very good now, but there was always the potential that you would be able to find something in the future. This will also break any saved links to conversations. (Printing to PDF doesn’t work, but I have been archiving ones I want to keep by using EagleFiler’s system service<\/a> hotkey to save the selected text as a Web archive.)<\/p>\n

I see no reason that Discord and other free competitors won’t eventually do the same thing.<\/p>\n\n

Adam Engst<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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From Slack’s perspective, this policy update will reduce its data storage needs and may trigger some upgrades in the next two months. I doubt most free existing teams were dragging their heels on upgrading because they knew they could always recover all their old content. But perhaps it will increase the incentive for new free teams to upgrade.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I don’t really get it because it doesn’t seem like it would reduce Slack’s costs that much, nor would many stragglers on the free plan be able to or choose to upgrade.<\/p>\n\n

Lucas Mearian<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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What Slack will eventually be able to offer both its own and Salesforce’s users is a unified experience where AI oversees any influx of both structured and unstructured data and parses through it to offer users the most important summaries. Being able to find key moments in chats and knowing what happened in conversations is hard to navigate, Dresser said, and is at the heart of Slack’s AI integration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n