This might change in the future as Discord tries to recoup their VCs' investment. See GitLab for a recent example.

GitLab is charging for metered compute minutes, which is hardly an unreasonable bargain for users who have been them for free for two years. Slack's feature-gating is disconnected from any unit economics - indeed, they actually do _store_ the messages prior to the most recent 10,000, but they just refuse to index them. The cost of that indexing is relatively minimal and does not scale linearly with number of users.

Doesn't matter what the technical justification is, it's a business move, not a tech move. It's about the customer's willingness to pay, and it looks like for Slack, companies are very willing to pay.

> But according to Butterfield, Slack is actually an acronym. It stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."

https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name...

Being better than Slack’s search doesn’t make it good.