Reflections

Buyer beware: Who owns your Slack history?

Alya Abbott • 8 min read

There’s a new camera app that you’ll just love! Here’s the FAQ for SnatchCam:

  1. Can I view my pictures any time? You can view them for 90 days for free! After that, you can sign up for a paid plan to keep access. You’ve got a year until this app starts deleting older pictures.
  2. Can I download my pictures? You can download the ones you’ve shared with all your friends! A paid plan is required to download the rest.
  3. I wrote an app to crop my ex out of my pictures. Can I use it? You can use any app in our app store.
  4. Can I use my app if it’s not in your app store? To keep you safe, you can use your app on up to 15 photos per minute if it’s not in the app store.
  5. All right, how do I get my app into your app store? Submit it for review, and we’ll approve if your app is the right fit for the SnatchCam Marketplace. Make sure at least 9 of your friends already have it installed.
  6. I’m switching to another camera app. I’m on a paid plan — you said I can download my pictures? You need a more expensive paid plan.
  7. OK, I’m on the expensive plan now, let me download my photos! Your application to download your photos has been denied.

Sounds crazy, right? The content you created being held hostage by the tool you used to create it — who’d agree to such a thing?

Anyone who signs up for Slack, it turns out. In this post, we’ll explore how Slack’s policies treat the messages that you send in Slack just like the imaginary SnatchCam treats your photos.

Exporting your own data: Even a paid plan is not enough

Slack has increasingly been restricting users’ access to their own communications. Some changes have largely affected communities and other groups that can’t afford a paid Slack plan. In July 2022, Slack “simplified” their plans by limiting message history access to 90 days on the free plan. The other shoe dropped in August 2024, when Slack started deleting messages older than a year.

Slack does offer an official export tool for downloading your team’s chat history. While the format isn’t fully documented, it’s been good enough for alternatives like Zulip to robustly import Slack workspaces.

We’ve guided hundreds of organizations through the process of moving their communication history out of Slack. Folks on Slack’s free plan are often pleasantly surprised that the export includes more than the 90 days of message history accessible from the app.

The unpleasant surprise is that exporting private channels and direct messages requires a Business+ plan ($15/user/month) plus approval from Slack. Anecdotally, organizations that tried upgrading from a lower-tier plan for one month in order to get their data out have had their export applications denied.

Workspace Owners on Business+ can apply to access additional export types.

— Slack’s instructions for exporting a workspace [emphasis added]

Slack community sponsorships: Here today, gone next week

Export restrictions have been brutal for communities that use Slack. Slack had a generous community sponsorship program prior to its 2020 acquisition by Salesforce. Since then, Saleforce has been unpredictably kicking communities out of the program.

Imagine you’re one of the people running the Kubernetes community on Slack, with over 10,000 monthly active members. One morning in June 2025, you wake up to the news that in less than a week, you’ll lose your sponsored Slack plan. Your workspace will be downgraded to Slack Free, with 90 days of accessible message history; messages older than a year may be permanently deleted.

You scramble to back up a decade of institutional knowledge as you prepare to move to another platform. Lacking the ability to export data outside of public channels, you are forced to plead with community members to individually export data from their private channels using third-party tools. (Salesforce has postponed the downgrade for now.)

Other communities have been moving off Slack preemptively, even if that may mean losing the parts of their institutional history that live in private channels and direct messages. As NumFOCUS wrote in their announcement about switching from Slack to Zulip:

Our current Slack setup is based on a nonprofit pricing arrangement,… [which] can be rescinded at any time, as we experienced previously when our access was briefly revoked and only reinstated due to a personal connection.

In recent years, Slack’s evolving policies, including nebulous privacy practices, and increased limitations on message history retention, have raised concerns among our stakeholders. Additionally, some open-source communities with similar nonprofit Slack arrangements have been charged retroactively with thousands of dollars, often without clear explanations. This has underscored the precarious nature of relying on Slack’s goodwill for nonprofit support.

How can you interact with your messages? Slack decides.

Slack’s controlling attitude towards how users can interact with their message history shapes its policies for all customers, regardless of what plan they’re on. As Slack announced in May, apps outside the Slack Marketplace are now limited to fetching a single batch of up to 15 messages per minute via the API. The Slack Marketplace approval process excludes internal tooling, so this effectively blocks users from building internal tools that process their own messages.

The Slack Marketplace team may use their judgment to deny any app from being listed. Some apps are unsuitable for the Slack Marketplace, including apps that:

  • export or backup message data.
  • …
  • are installed on less than 10 active workspaces…
  • are in private beta, still being built, or have not been fully tested.

— Slack Marketplace app guidelines and requirements

Why did Slack impose this extremely low rate limit? Oh, to protect customers, of course:

Slack is strengthening and clarifying our policies so we can better safeguard customers and support innovation while preventing unsanctioned data scraping and abuse.

— Slack’s announcement of rate limit changes for non-Marketplace apps

Wait, but seriously, why? Couldn’t they instead warn users about the risks of unreviewed applications, and require non-Marketplace apps to be approved by workspace owners? Yes, yes they could.

But Salesforce believes that AI is the future, making control over data and AI integrations a strategic imperative for the company. Slack’s new policy offers them monopoly control over the tools you use to process your communication history.

Is SnatchCam Slack still the best option despite it all?

The team chat market is dominated by the Slack and Microsoft Teams duopoly. Teams controls the lion’s share, achieved in large part through monopolistic bundling practices under investigation by the European Union. Discord is the most popular team chat app for communities, but lacks basic security and account management features expected for business use.

Teams does treat its users better than Slack in one way: in February of this year, Microsoft introduced a data export tool for migrating off Teams without any of Slack’s restrictive policies. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s strategy has not necessitated building a great product. If you try Teams after using Slack, you may soon become interested in one of those exports.

Discord offers no official export tool, but does allow third-party tools to export data via the API. With a new CEO and an IPO in the works, it’s hard to predict how Discord’s policies might change in the coming months.

Your team chat app doesn’t have to be owned by a corporate giant, however. In fact, the strongest protection against a vendor restricting your access to your own data is using software that you self-host. (This also ensures that your data won’t be misused by the vendor.) If you prefer a cloud product, using an open-source vendor that offers a robust migration path from their SaaS offering to self-hosting offers protection against restrictive policy changes.

Are there open-source apps that come close to Slack’s product experience? People spend hours per day on chat, so everything hinges on this question. Thankfully, the answer in 2025 is “yes”. The alternative will be different from Slack, of course — worse in some ways, and better in others.

All our digital communication flows through Zulip… We have three deep learning channels, each with twenty active topics a day. No other chat system could support that.

— John Dean, co-founder and CEO of WindBorne (case study)

Talking to folks who are thinking about moving off Slack, three concerns come up time after time. None turn out to be as bad as they might seem, so I think it’s worth going through them.

  1. All my partners are on Slack Connect. There are two effective ways to handle this: bridging between your partner’s Slack channel and another app, or inviting partners to use your app as guests. For example, Zulip lets you create reusable invitation links for inviting users as guests and subscribing them to the right channels, which you could share with your partners.

  2. How will I move my integrations? Alternatives to Slack commonly accept Slack’s incoming webhook format, so most integrations can be moved over simply by making a bot and updating the URL for the integration.

  3. Will people be confused, annoyed, or upset by having to use an unfamiliar app? From what we hear, this problem is entirely solvable with onboarding. You may already have guidelines on how Slack should be used, which could be updated for another product.

I can’t tell you whether Slack or another app is the best choice for you. But I hope you feel empowered to take back control over your own communications, should you decide to do so.