Slack traded a message cap for a 90-day window

A cap replaced by a calendar

Slack's free plan used to limit history by volume: the last 10,000 messages and 5GB of file storage, whichever came first. Reporting on Slack's own announcement put the change at 19 July 2022: from 1 September 2022, the free plan would instead show the last 90 days of messages and files, with no storage ceiling, and would gain access to Clips. The same announcement raised the paid Pro plan's price for the first time since Slack's 2014 launch, from $8 to $8.75 a month per user, or $6.67 to $7.25 a month billed annually, a detail worth noting because one announcement changed both the free plan's shape and the paid plan's price at once. Slack's own post from that period is no longer published on slack.com, which is itself a reminder that a vendor's announcement page is not a permanent record unless someone else keeps a copy of what it said.

What the rule looks like from inside Slack today

Slack's help centre, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, still describes the free plan in the same terms: messages and files from the last 90 days are visible and searchable, older content is hidden, and up to ten third-party or custom apps can be installed. Slack's pricing page confirms unlimited message history remains a paid-plan feature. In shape, the 2022 change is still the operating rule four years on.

The friction: hidden is not the same as deleted, until it is

The same help article records a further, more consequential change: starting 26 August 2024, customer data older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from free-plan workspaces. That turns a 90-day search limit into a genuine one-year retention ceiling. A team that treated a free Slack workspace as an informal record, assuming old messages were merely hidden rather than gone, now has a dated reason to check that assumption.

• Does anyone on your team rely on Slack search for anything older than 90 days?
• If nothing has been exported before the one-year mark, is that history now unrecoverable?
• Would a paid tier's retention terms actually meet a genuine record-keeping need, rather than only its price?

The free-plan boundary has not stayed still since 2022. It moved once from a message count to a rolling window, and again from a search limit to an outright deletion policy, and a team using the free plan as a record should treat both changes as still current.