The limitations and considerations around your Slack Free plans, and whether to upgrade your organization or community.
Slack markets its free tier as a great way for small teams to stay connected. And while it includes core features—channels, 1:1 DMs, file sharing, and up to 10 app integrations—it comes with some serious caveats that can catch teams off guard.
Free Slack users can only search and view messages from the last 90 days. Any older messages are hidden. Even worse, any content older than 1 year is permanently deleted. That means lost context, lost files, and lost decisions.
The free tier caps file storage at 5 GB—shared across all users. That fills up fast with attachments, PDFs, and screenshots. And once you hit that limit, nothing new can be saved until you delete older files.
You’re restricted to just 10 app integrations, and group video calls (Huddles) are disabled—only one-on-one calls are allowed. This can seriously dent collaboration across tools and remote teams.
Slack removes guest accounts when downgrading to free and disables custom sidebar sections, user groups, Canvases, Lists, and user profiles. Teams lose valuable structure and onboarding clarity.
Slack’s paid plans start at $8.75–$9 per user/month, with Business+ and Enterprise tiers costing significantly more. For small teams, the jump from free to paid can be a tough pill to swallow—especially when budget is already tight.
Slack's free plan still allows admins to export public channel history (as JSON). You can also leverage Slack’s API with community tools (e.g., GitHub “slack-backup”) to auto-archive conversations. But these require time, coding skills, and aren’t user-friendly.
You can convert JSON exports into HTML or readable formats—via tools like Slack Log Viewer, Slackord (to move archives into Discord). These help preserve content, but don’t seamlessly integrate with Slack or scale well.
ViewExport exists to tackle the pain points head-on — making it easy to backup, search, and restore Slack data, even on the free plan. Here’s how:
Every message (public channel, private channel, DM—where permitted) and file is automatically backed up, preserving history beyond 90 days. No data disappears.
Rather than upgrading every Slack seat at ~$9/month, a one-time or affordable subscription to ViewExport unlocks full history at a fraction of the cost.
ViewExport offers a powerful search UI on top of your archive—letting you search years of messages and attachments instantly, not just the “recent” 90 days.
Need to switch platforms or hand over records? ViewExport supports export in user-friendly formats—HTML, JSON, PDF—making migrations or audits seamless.
Slack’s free plan is great for getting started, but its message history cut-off, storage limits, app restrictions, and steep upgrade cost can disrupt growing teams. That’s where ViewExport shines—capturing all your Slack content automatically, giving you searchable archives that span years, and offering a cost-effective, scalable way to keep your team’s communication safe and accessible.
If you’re running into disappearing messages or blocked access to files, or if upgrading Slack seems too steep for your budget, ViewExport is the buffer you need between Slack’s free limitations and your team’s productivity.
