Slack starts removing features from free customers

Slack has been growing a lot lately, so the company has decided to start removing features it offered to free customers. If you’re not paying for Slack, you’ll soon be unable to use some features as the company puts them behind a paywall.

The first one that will no longer be available to free customers come August is free lifetime message history. Slack announced over the weekend that starting August 26, it will begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis.

Slack says that it has changed subscriptions and features to maintain the quality of the app for its customers, but since its customers base grew so much over the years, it’s now unable to provide non-paying customers with some features that require a lot of resources.

That said, Slack will no longer keep messages and files from the lifetime of your free workspace. If you’re keeping your files stored on Slack’s database and you’re a non-paying customer, everything that’s older than a year will be deleted.

According to Slack, customers who choose to not pay for a subscription will have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available if they decide to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Customers who eventually upgrade will have their messages and files based on their chosen retention period stored, with an option to keep all history.

It’s worth noting that in order to avoid losing your message and file history, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid subscription before August 26. If you’d rather remain freemium, then your only other option would be to export your stored files, which can be done with the free version of Slack.

Currently, Slack offers three subscription tiers: Pro ($8.75), Business+ ($15), and Enterprise Grid (price varies). All three subscription tiers offer customers unlimited message history.