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Is Slack AI Worth It?

A critical look at whether Slack AI is worth the monthly cost and an open-source alternative that may meet a similar need.

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A piggy bank being smashed to pay for SlackAI

More than ever, Slack is at the center of our work lives and an unavoidable part of our daily communication. As generative AI continues to explode in popularity, the crossover between the two is bound to be interesting.

Slack itself has released a set of premium features dubbed “Slack AI” and is charging between $10-20/mo per user to access them, and they require you to be on the Enterprise tier. That means it could be more like $20-30 per user per month to get access if you’re currently on a lower plan.

And if you’re using the free tier, such as for a virtual community, you’re out of luck.

The user experience and features look slick and well-executed. If you’re not price-sensitive and expect high adoption, it’s probably a great choice.

An advantage of the official offering is knowing exactly how much it will cost you each month since there are no overage or LLM fees to consider.

One of the biggest challenges with LLM products today is that pricing based on access (i.e., per user, per month) means that you have to be absolutely sure that people will use it. Other common workspace tools face the same challenge. Plus, most enterprise tools are all or nothing; you have to buy them for your whole team or nobody, which makes for quite the ROI hurdle to jump over.

The alternative is pricing based on usage. Generally speaking, the gold standard for pricing models is to tie your pricing to your value. If the customer gets more value, they don’t mind the cost going up (at an appropriate ratio).

Accordingly, the best pricing model for an LLM-based product/feature is one where you pay based on how much and how many people actually use it rather than on how many people have access.

Coincidentally, this ends up being the price of homegrown solutions, where the cost essentially boils down to the LLM fees.

If you’d rather have access to this kind of pricing model for Slack AI, you’re in luck because we had the same desire and decided to open-source it. You can get it up and running for yourself or pay a nominal monthly fee for a fully hosted solution. Either way — just plug in your API keys, and you’ll be up and running. Learn more here.