re-posting a comment by me on #off-topic earlier today: as a side note, I just had a chat with the slack support asking them if there was some way to support a community of our size with some kind of plan that would involve an increase in the chat history (...just struck out on finding the answer to a question I posted a few months back...getting senile I guess). The rep was quite impressed with our size (quote: “oh wow”!) and said that we were a fantastic use case for slack. He also said they were discussing “community paid plans” but that at the current time nothing suitable was available... :[ The default plan with 12k users and $7 per user calculates to rougly $84k per month. I told the rep it would be nice with some paid plan that was more expensive than free but cheaper than 84k. He said he totally saw our need and would bring it up the chain…for whatever it’s worth. So for the time being it seems that the slack log mentioned above is still very much needed.

the thing is that I think plenty of people here would pay $7/month to get search even if not everyone paid

slack is leaving a lot of money on the table imo

I absolutely would.

as would I

Several large Slack communities have raised this same issue with Slack directly, repeatedly, over the years and the answer is pretty much always the same platitudes, unfortunately.

At least they're no longer warning communities that "If you reach 5,000 members, we'll cut you off!"

The crazy thing is they do store the entire message history for every community. It's not like they're just throwing it away.

They just don't show it in the UI or via search. So all these huge communities are costing them a bunch in terms of stored message archives.

I assume there are either business or technical reasons even if I don’t understand them :) they are clearly aware of the situation and choosing not to go there.

Right, they’re just willing to take the all-or-nothing bet on membership.

storage is cheap

I mean one reason may just simply be how to take money from individuals vs “teams” - it’s a totally different billing model

It’s like newspapers with their online subscription paywalls. I can’t pay every newspaper $10/month for a digital subscription, especially if a lot of the news is covered more or less the same way.

that seems dumb, but it’s a matter of balancing dev resources

It’s not like it actually costs them $10/month to serve my traffic.

(sorry, @alexmiller for stepping on your train of thought)

No worries :)

I assume they are worried that people will essentially pool together on one giant slack server. pretty easy to do since you can have lots of channels.