The conversation you rely on will be deleted
The client agreed to the extra work in a message. Not in the quote, not in the contract - in the thread where the two of you had been sorting out the details for a fortnight, somewhere between a photograph of the wrong tiles and a question about parking.
That message is the record. It says what was agreed and when, in the client's own words, with a timestamp. If anyone ever queries the invoice, it is the thing you would go and find.
Your chat platform does not see it that way. To the platform it is a row of storage on a plan you are not paying for, and the terms under which that storage is kept are published, precise, and shorter than most businesses assume. This article is about the gap between those two views, and about the fact that the gap costs nothing to close while the conversation is still there.
What does a free plan do to old messages?
It hides them at ninety days and deletes them at a year. Slack states both steps in consecutive sentences on its usage-limits page.
The first: "You can view and search messages and files from the last 90 days." And what happens beyond that point: "When your workspace reaches the visibility limit, Slack will start hiding messages and files older than 90 days to make room for new ones."
Then the second step, in the very next sentence: "Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted."
The linked explanation puts the two together in one line, and the arithmetic is worth holding on to: on a free workspace "...you'll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan." Ninety days visible, two hundred and seventy-five days present but out of reach, and after three hundred and sixty-five days nothing at all.
The same page states the change of policy plainly: "Slack will no longer keep messages and files for the lifetime of your free workspace." That sentence is the one worth reading if you set the workspace up years ago on the understanding that everything stayed put, because for a long time it did.
One date matters for everything below. This began on 26 August 2024, which is over two years ago. It is not a change coming down the line; it has been running in the background for two years, and any advice you may have read from before that date describes a world in which old messages were hidden but still recoverable.
Two sentences on one page, and they do not agree
Slack's usage-limits page says two different things about the same deletion, and the difference is not academic.
Under the heading about visibility, the wording is flat and certain: "Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted."
Barely a hundred words further down, under a separate heading about data retention, the same subject is described like this: "Starting August 26, 2024, Customer Data — such as messages and file history — older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from workspaces on the free plan, following the terms described in the Main Services Agreement and Trust and Compliance Documentation."
Will be permanently deleted. May be deleted on a rolling basis. The page does not reconcile them, and both were live on the same page on the day this was written.
Take the pair seriously rather than picking the one you prefer. A business skim-reading this page will land on the softer sentence, conclude that deletion is a possibility somewhere on the horizon, and file the whole subject under things to think about later. The platform's behaviour follows the harder one. "Rolling basis" is not a softener either - it means there is no single date to prepare for. Every day, the material that has just crossed the line becomes eligible.
Can any of it be recovered?
No. Slack answers this question directly in its own FAQ, under the heading asking whether deleted messages and files can be recovered: "It will not be possible to restore messages and files once deletion occurs."
There was an escape route, and it closed two years ago: "Existing free workspaces that upgrade to a paid plan before August 26, 2024 won't be impacted." Upgrading now protects what is still there. It does not bring back what has gone.
That combination - a published rule, a firm deadline, and no undo - is unusual enough to be worth naming. Most of the ways a small business loses information have a second chance somewhere in them: a backup, a deleted-items folder, a support ticket that gets escalated. Here the vendor has told you in advance, in writing, on a page linked from the one that describes your plan, that there is nothing behind the door.
Pinning does not protect anything
The instinct, when a message matters, is to pin it or save it. It is worth knowing what that does and does not do.
Slack's page on data retention settings is explicit: "Retention settings will apply to all messages, files, canvases, and lists, including those that are pinned or saved." Pinning is a bookmark, not a preservation order. The pinned message where a supplier confirmed the price goes at the same time as everything around it.
The same page carries a warning aimed squarely at whoever administers the workspace: "Note: Data deleted according to your retention setting is permanent. Adjust these settings with care." Which is also a statement about where the responsibility sits. The tool is offered, the consequences are described, and the decision is yours.
Which parts of your business are running on something nobody chose - that is the first half of the process audit: what can be automated, in what order, and what each piece is worth, in writing, in three business days.
What does an export actually contain?
Less than the word suggests, and the specifics matter more than the principle.
Slack's guide to its import and export tools describes what a free workspace can take out: "Exports: Workspace Owners and Admins can export data from public channels. Data exports will include links to files, but not the files themselves. Data more than a year old will not be included."
Three separate limits in one sentence. No direct messages and no private channels, which is where most of the sensitive conversation with a client actually happens. Links to files instead of the files, so the photograph of the damaged delivery is a broken address rather than a picture. And nothing older than a year, which is the same boundary as the deletion.
A separate Slack page adds a further restriction: "Note: Workspaces on the Free plan can only export links to files from the last 90 days."
You can apply for more, and the terms of the application are set out plainly: Workspace Owners may apply to export private channels and direct messages, but "We will reject applications unless Workspace Owners show in each instance (a) valid legal process, or (b) consent of members, or (c) a requirement or right under applicable laws in order to export data."
A second Slack page is less encouraging still: in its plan comparison table, the row covering exports of private channels and direct messages reads "Not available" for the free plan. Both pages were live on the same day.
Read that as a small business rather than as a lawyer. Wanting your own history back is not on the list. The three grounds are a court, everybody's individual agreement, or a legal entitlement you can point to. Whether your business has one of those is a question for whoever advises you, and it is a question best asked before the history is gone rather than after.
What does it cost to try?
Follow the sequence for a workspace that gets the warning. The notice arrives inside the app, with a date specific to that workspace, a couple of weeks out. The immediate escape is to upgrade before the date, which costs a paid plan for every member from that month on. Then comes the export rule described above: the public channels come out, and the request for private message history is refused unless one of the three grounds applies - and a volunteer group or an informal team has none of them to point at, where a business with employment agreements often would. The migration to wherever the history is going takes weeks or months on top of that, and the private conversations are still lost at the end of it.
Two weeks of notice, a paid plan to start and more before it is done, months from warning to migration, and part of the record gone anyway. The instructive part is where the effort goes: almost none of it into the export itself, almost all of it into discovering the rules after the clock has started.
Does the platform warn you?
Yes, and this is the part of the story where the platform comes off better than the summary suggests.
The change was announced roughly two months before it started - in June 2024 for an August 2024 start - and free workspaces were offered a route to keep everything by upgrading before the cut-off. And the deletion is not silent when it arrives: a warning appears inside the app naming a specific date for that specific workspace.
What I cannot tell you is whether an email goes to the workspace owner. None of Slack's help pages I read says that one does, and none says that one does not. Slack's help pages simply do not answer the question, and I am not going to read neglect into a gap in documentation. Telling you nobody is warned would be inventing an answer.
The honest position is narrower and, for a business, more useful. A warning of this kind arrives in the place people are least likely to be looking after it: inside a chat application, addressed to whoever happens to be an administrator, about a consequence months in the future. It is the same category of problem as an automation failure that nobody was told about - the notice exists, and the noticing is what is missing.
What happens if you move down from a paid plan?
This is the version that catches businesses that did everything right, and then economised.
Slack's page on the free version's limitations states the consequence of downgrading in one sentence: "On the free version of Slack, you'll be limited to the most recent 90 days of message and file history, and all data in your workspace that's more than one year old will be deleted."
A workspace that has been paid-for since 2019 holds seven years of decisions, approvals and attachments. Downgrading does not put that history into cold storage; the second half of that sentence applies to it. It is worth knowing before the renewal conversation, not after it, because the saving is a monthly figure and the loss is not recoverable at any price.
Not every platform deletes by age
It would be easy to conclude that all chat is temporary. That is not what the vendors document, and the differences are large enough to matter when you choose where a conversation should happen.
| Platform | What its own documentation says |
|---|---|
| Slack, free plan | Hidden after 90 days, deleted after one year, on a rolling basis since 26 August 2024 |
| Microsoft Teams Free | No age-based deletion of messages; the duration is "Determined by user" |
| Discord | Personal data retained, "in general", "for as long as you have an active Discord account" |
| Google Chat, history off | "If you turn history Off, messages are deleted after 24 hours" |
| "Once your messages are delivered, they are deleted from our servers" | |
| Zoom Team Chat | "retained for 24 months from the date of collection by default" |
| Notion, free plan | Page version history goes back "7 days if you're on a Free Plan" |
Two rows deserve a sentence each. Google Chat's history switch is worse than Slack's clock and easier to trip: a conversation with history off is gone the next day, and Google's administrator documentation adds that its compliance tool "can't hold, retain, or search direct messages that are sent with history turned off". Where the administrator allows users to change that setting, either participant can remove the record and the safety net together.
WhatsApp is the opposite extreme, and a lot of trades and clinics use it with customers. Meta's privacy policy states that messages are "not typically stored on our servers" and are deleted from them on delivery; an undelivered message is held "for up to 30 days" and then dropped. So there is effectively no platform-side history to lose. The entire record of what a customer agreed to lives on one handset - and the backup has its own clock, since WhatsApp warns that backups "that haven't been updated in 5 months might be automatically deleted by Google".
The chat window is not the record
The clearest statement of this whole subject comes from Microsoft rather than from Slack, in documentation about retention policies:
Messages visible in the Teams app are not an accurate reflection of whether they're retained or permanently deleted for compliance requirements.
What you can see in the app and what actually exists are two different questions. Something visible may already be deleted for record-keeping purposes; something invisible may still exist. The window shows you an interface, and whether the thing behind it survives is a separate question with a separate answer.
And the platforms know perfectly well what businesses use them for. Slack's own description of the value of message history says you can "find decisions that have been made about past projects or files that have been shared during meetings". Decisions. That is the word, on the vendor's page. None of the pages I read suggests the tool is where a decision should permanently live.
This is the difference between this article and how long your automation's run history is kept. There, what expires is a machine's log of what it did, and losing it costs you the ability to prove a process ran. Here, what expires is the sentence in which a person agreed to something - and it is the only copy. Which is also why agreeing what "done" means before the work starts belongs somewhere more durable than the thread you agreed it in.
What should you do while it is all still there?
Five things, in the order they are worth doing. None of them requires changing platform.
- Establish which plan you are actually on, and when the workspace was created. A workspace set up before August 2024 on a free plan has already been through this for two years. Whatever is older than a year is gone, and the question is only what to do about the next twelve months.
- Name the two or three conversations that hold agreements. Not all of them. The client threads where prices and scope were settled, and the supplier threads where dates were promised. Everything else can go without anybody minding.
- Move the agreement out of the chat on the day it is made. One line in the job record, the invoice, or the quote - "extra tiling agreed by the client on 14 March, see photo" - is worth more than the entire thread a year later, and it takes ten seconds while the conversation is in front of you.
- Run the export now, and look at what comes out. Run it to find out what your export actually contains before you need it; filing it away is a different job. If it is public channels only, with links instead of files, better to learn that this week than in the week somebody disputes an invoice.
- Write down where each kind of record lives. Which conversations happen in chat, which in email, which end up in your job or booking system. The same half-page that settles which system owns which field can carry a column for how long each place keeps things, and that column is where this article stops being news and becomes a decision.
Separately, and without going further than the facts here support: some records have to be kept for reasons that have nothing to do with your chat platform's plan. Whatever those obligations are for your business, the platform's clock is not aware of them.
When this stops being a chat question
For a business with a handful of customer conversations a month, this is a five-minute habit and nothing more: the agreement gets written into the job when it is made, and the chat is just where the talking happened.
It stops being that when the chat has quietly become the system - when nobody could say where the record of an agreement lives without going to look, when attachments arrive in threads and never leave them, and when the answer to "what did we promise them in the spring" is a search box on a plan you are not paying for. At that point retention policy is the small half of it. A working part of your business is running inside a tool that publishes, in writing, how long it keeps things - and the answer is shorter than the business is.
If you would rather have somebody go through the places your business keeps things and work out what can be automated, in what order, and what each piece is worth, that is the process audit. $299, three business days, and a written map you keep whether or not you hire us.