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Still under construction
Creating a Slack workspace is free, but there are limitations on the free version. Foremost among those is the fact that you are limited to a total of 10,000 messages across the workspace. That may sound like more than you'll ever need--but it includes every private message, every group message, and every message posted by an integrated app. In a large and/or active group, or one that persists over a long period of time, you can easily hit that 10K message cap--and after that, messages "scroll off the top" in terms of access. (They are preserved in the database, but are inaccessible if you don't upgrade to the paid version.) Additionally, the free version won't allow you to integrate with your organization's authentication, so students need to create their own usernames and passwords for access.
Unfortunately, the paid version of Slack is based on a per-user charge, making it unworkable for most higher education contexts. Even with their extremely generous 85% discount for educational institutions, the cost is $12/year/user. That pricing model works well in business, where workgroups tend to have a small, set number of employees. It can even work if you have a small, set number of students each year. But for those of us teaching 60-90 different students each term, it simply doesn't work.
The good news is that those limitations haven't impacted Slack's usefulness in my classrooms at all.
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This page is part of Liz Lawley's Fork Your Syllabus, You Slacker! : A DML Teach-In, 6 October 2017