Slack After Salesforce: How a $27.7B Acquisition Destroyed a Beloved Product

When Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in July 2021, the promise was that Slack would become the front end for Salesforce's customer relationship platform — a marriage of enterprise software and beloved workplace communication. Three years later, the marriage has produced a product that's slower, more expensive, and losing market share.

The Performance Degradation

Pre-acquisition Slack was snappy. Messages appeared instantly. Channels loaded in milliseconds. The electron app, while memory-hungry, was responsive. Post-acquisition Slack has become noticeably slower. Startup time on standard hardware has grown from approximately 3 seconds to 8 seconds. Message delivery latency has increased. The app now consumes more memory as Salesforce integration features load in the background whether you use them or not.

The free tier has been progressively gutted. Message history is now limited to 90 days (down from unlimited). File storage has been reduced. Guest access has been restricted. Each limitation is designed to push teams toward paid plans that start at $7.25 per user per month — a significant cost for startups and small teams that were Slack's original core audience.

Stop guessing about site quality

Get a data-backed score and the exact prompts to fix issues.

The Discord Migration

Discord, originally built for gaming communities, has become the de facto Slack alternative for developer teams, open source projects, and small companies. Discord offers unlimited message history, high-quality voice channels, video calls, screen sharing, and community management tools — all free for servers under 500 members.

The developer community migration from Slack to Discord has accelerated since 2023. Major open source projects, developer communities, and startup teams have moved their communication to Discord, citing cost, performance, and feature advantages. Discord's thread system, stage channels, and forum channels offer capabilities Slack has been slow to match.

The Salesforce Playbook

Slack's trajectory follows Salesforce's established acquisition pattern. Buy a popular product (Tableau, MuleSoft, Slack). Integrate it into the Salesforce ecosystem. Raise prices. Push enterprise features. Deprioritize the features that made the product popular with smaller users. Extract value from the brand while the product gradually loses its identity.