This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history.
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post, for example.
In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
I work with a ton of scientists (and am one myself) and I’m a member of multiple slack channels with hundreds of members that are years old and only have a 1-2k messages.
An example is a Python users group where there’s maybe a few threads a week. And it’s really useful to search for old threads.
Another is a hackathon with maybe 30 people where there were a few hundred messages over a week and then 1 message a month.
I don't mean to say that people were led to believe that free instances had no limits - just that this is a reversal of the nature of those limits. Groups that had planned based on the old limits are now in a tough spot.
I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.
I jumped up and down about this to Slack over the course of a few emails, having some paid workspaces and a couple on the free plan that I use(d) for family. Eventually I got one of those "Hi this is such and such, stepping in for the other person" emails, with a link to this app that can export everything (including private messages):
The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.
You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.
Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money)
- never going to pay (families, online communities)
Changing this to 90-days plan:
- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack.
- Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day
- Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away
The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.