Selling your company's Slack data for AI training: what the export allows and who buys it

Yes, in principle: a company can license its own Slack history to an AI buyer, and buyers name Slack among the first systems they ask for. But Slack's own terms decide what you can take out and how. Every plan lets the workspace's administrators export public channels as JSON; private channels and direct messages come out only by an application that Slack rejects on Free and Pro unless you show valid legal process, consent of members, or a right under law, and on Business+ the applicant must ensure " appropriate employment agreements and corporate policies" are in place. Slack's API terms bar an app offered to other organizations from using what it pulls " to train a large language model", so the export has to be your own admin export, never a buyer's connector. The messages belong to your company as a matter of copyright, but they are full of people: employees, customers in shared channels, other companies' staff. Buyers pay for the whole working record, not for Slack alone: Polyshares states $100K to $2M and above for a company's operating record of Slack, email, tickets, CRM and files, and the median of the per-company sales on record is $28.3K per company. The steps are: confirm your plan and what it exports, decide which channels are in scope, export it yourself, take out what cannot be licensed, de-identify, and put the description of it before every buyer that fits at once.

This guide is for a founder, officer or trustee of a company, operating or closed, whose most valuable record is its Slack workspace. It covers what a workspace holds and which parts buyers value, what each Slack plan lets you export, Slack's API and AI terms as they read on 19 October 2026, the employees and customers whose messages are inside and the law that governs them, de-identification, what buyers pay for company records that include Slack, preparing and delivering the export, the case of a closed company, and how a sale through AIData.Broker works. Every quote comes from the page it names, read on the day shown in its record.

This guide is research from public sources, not legal advice.

Contents

1. What a Slack workspace holds, and what buyers value in it
2. What Slack lets you export, plan by plan
3. Slack's API terms and AI terms, as they read today
4. Whose messages are in it: employees, customers and other companies
5. De-identifying a Slack export
6. What buyers pay for company records that include Slack
7. Preparing and delivering a Slack export
8. A closed company's Slack
9. How a sale through AIData.Broker works
10. Questions people ask
11. What this means for you

1. What a Slack workspace holds, and what buyers value in it

A Slack workspace is the closest thing most young companies have to a complete record of how they worked. Email holds the outside world and the formal decisions; Slack holds the inside: an engineer asking why a deploy failed, three colleagues working out the answer, the link to the pull request that fixed it, a product manager summing up the decision, a support lead pasting a customer's complaint and asking who owns it. For an AI buyer, that sequence is the material. Models that act inside companies (agents that answer questions, file tickets, write code and hand work to each other) need examples of real work moving from a problem to a resolution, with the people, the timing and the tools around it. Public text on the web has very little of that, because companies do not publish their internal chat.

The buyers say so in their own words. Scale AI's data partnership page lists Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat and asks for " full conversation histories, threads, participants, and reply structure preserved intact". Polyshares, which buys companies' operating records for its own account, explains on its Slack guide that a thread is valuable because " a question, the replies and the outcome sit in one thread with names and timestamps", and that channel names, reactions and file references add structure: they show which topics belong together, which replies people agreed with and which documents a discussion was about. A buyer's revenue chief went further on the record in October 2026: if a company will not sell its Slack, CRM or email records, the rest of its corpus is worth less.

Four things in a workspace move its value most.

Threads with outcomes. A thread that starts with a question and ends with an answer, a decision or a merged fix is a complete example. A channel of announcements nobody replied to is close to worthless. Buyers that describe what they look for in communications data name the same signals: Corpus Bridge, a broker, counts outcomes attached and clean threading as adding value, along with languages other than English.

Links to other systems. A Slack message that links a Jira ticket, a GitHub pull request, a Google Doc or a Zendesk case ties the conversation to the work product. Sunset, a wind-down firm that buys closing companies' records, told Forbes it prices on how traceable records are and how well they connect across systems, and that a ticket tied to a specific code commit is worth more than a standalone document. The link only carries value if the other end comes too, which is why buyers price the whole record and why your Slack is worth more beside your ticket tracker and code than on its own.

Years. A workspace used daily for many years shows a company changing: hiring, new products, incidents, reorganizations. The market's estimators price years directly. Ooak's estimator, for example, values a 51 to 100 person operating company with four or more years and six tools at $85k to $121k, and the same company with seven or more years at $99k to $139k.

The people who wrote it. Buyers pay more for the work of white-collar specialists than for general chatter. Mode.Inc's chief executive told reporters that value rises with the number of white-collar employees, and law and accounting are among the fields where buyers report especially high demand. An engineering team's workspace, full of debugging and design discussion, also connects directly to the code buyers want for software agents (see the codebase guide).

What lowers value is the opposite: a workspace with few threads, little history, mostly social channels, or links that lead nowhere because the other systems are gone. Bots and integrations that post automated alerts make up a large share of many workspaces; they are not worthless (an alert followed by the humans who resolved it is a good example), but a channel of alerts with no replies adds bulk, not value. A plain count of your workspace before you talk to anyone, split by public channels, private channels and direct messages, tells you most of what a buyer will ask first. Polyshares' guide shows where to find it: workspace analytics show messages sent and files uploaded, and an export lets you count messages exactly.

2. What Slack lets you export, plan by plan

Slack controls the gate here, and the gate differs by plan. Its help page on exporting says who may use the export feature: org admins on Enterprise plans, the top workspace roles on Free, Pro and Business+, and members with the Export Admin role. What they may take out depends on the plan.

Sources: Slack's help pages on exporting workspace data, on import and export tools by plan and on free workspace history, each held in the Slack terms record.

Five things in that table decide what you can offer a buyer.

Public channels are always yours to export. On every plan, the workspace's administrators can export public channels themselves, from the admin settings, as a ZIP of JSON files. Polyshares, a buyer, says on its Slack guide that you decide whether private channels and DMs are in scope at all, and that "a public channel export on its own is a valid starting point". For many companies the public channels are where the engineering, product and support work happened anyway, and they carry the least personal material.

Private channels and DMs are the hard part, by design. On Free and Pro, Slack's guide to export tools says it will reject an application to export all conversations "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". Licensing to an AI buyer is not legal process, and it is not a requirement of law. The realistic routes are members' consent, which for a whole workspace means asking every person whose DMs would be exported, or upgrading the plan. On Business+, the tool is available " as needed and permitted by law", and the person applying must ensure that "(a) appropriate employment agreements and corporate policies have been implemented, and (b) all use of data exports is permitted under applicable law". Slack frames that export as a compliance tool. It does not say an AI licence is a forbidden use, but it puts the burden of showing the use is lawful on you, and a buyer's counsel will ask what your policies told staff about their DMs. Section 4 covers that question.

Exports hold links to files, not the files. Slack's guide says plainly that "Data exports will include links to files, but not the files themselves". The documents, screenshots and recordings people shared are reached through those links, which work only while the workspace exists and the files have not been deleted. If the shared files matter (design documents, logs, spreadsheets), download them while the workspace is live, or export them from the system they came from.

Free workspaces lose history every day. Since 26 August 2024, Slack deletes messages and files older than a year from free workspaces on a rolling basis. A company that downgraded to save money when it wound down has already lost everything older than a year; Polyshares' guide notes that a Free workspace can offer at most one year of history even if it is older. Our deletion clock counts the days each system keeps your data, and for Slack downgraded to free the window it shows is one year of history, on a rolling basis.

Shared channels with other companies are partial. When a workspace has Slack Connect channels, Slack's guide says only links to files shared by members of your workspace will be included in the export. The messages of the other company's staff are in the export; their files are not. That is a technical limit, and also a signal: those messages are the other company's material as much as yours (section 4).

Turing, one of the buyers of whole company records, accepts an intake only from someone with admin authority and asks for a rough count per system, so the person who can run the export is also the person who should start the conversation. Slack's top roles carry Slack's own names: the "Workspace Primary Owner" approves an application on Business+, and on Enterprise an org administrator asks Slack Support to enable the export tools. If the person who held that role has left, transfer it before you need it: an application waits on their approval.

3. Slack's API terms and AI terms, as they read today

Holders often hear that "Slack banned AI training on Slack data" and conclude that a Slack sale is impossible. That reading is wrong, and the correct one matters, because it decides how the data must leave your company.

What the API terms say. Slack's API Terms of Service, effective 10 October 2025 and unchanged when we read them on 19 October 2026, have a section headed Data Usage by Third Parties. It says: "As the provider of an Application offered for use outside your organization, you may not: (A) use API Data to train a large language model; (B) bulk export Slack message and file data except where expressly allowed by an additional agreement, such as by Applications using the Discovery API for approved security and compliance use cases; or (C) use data collected from one organization to directly benefit a different organization or any third party." Its Data Access API terms add that a third-party app may not create "persistent copies, archives, indexes, or long-term data stores of other organizations' API Data". Corpus Bridge, a broker for communications data, dates the change to May 2025 and tells holders to check a platform's terms before assuming a dataset can be assembled; the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth wrote in July 2025 that customers who built internal models on Slack data may need to redesign unless they negotiated limits on changes to the terms.

Who the clause binds. Read the words: they bind "the provider of an Application offered for use outside your organization". That is an app that other companies install: a buyer's connector, a broker's sync tool, a data-collection service that asks you to authorize it on your workspace. Such an app may not train a language model on what it pulls, may not bulk export, and may not use one organization's data to benefit another. A buyer that asks you to install its app on your Slack and pull your history through the API is asking you to help it breach Slack's terms. Of the 18 business systems whose terms we have read, 6 now bar training AI on what an app pulls through their API.

What the clause does not bind. The API terms do not govern your company's own export through Slack's admin export tool. That export is a feature of your subscription, and it is governed by the export rules in section 2: public channels freely, private channels and DMs by application and on Slack's conditions. So the route that works is the one the employee messages guide reaches from the law as well: each system exported by its own administrator with the vendor's native export tool, the method recorded, and no third-party connector touching it. A buyer's counsel treats data pulled through a connector as tainted, and lists Slack DMs exported without an approved application as a red flag.

Slack's own promise on AI training. Slack's privacy principles describe what Slack itself does with your messages, which is a separate question from what you may do with them. Slack says that "Slack will not use Customer Data to train generative AI models unless Customer provides affirmative opt-in consent", and that "Customers own their own Customer Data". Slack does use customer data for some non-generative models, such as channel and emoji suggestions and search ranking, and lets a workspace opt out of its global models by writing to Slack. Two consequences follow. First, Slack does not claim your messages for itself: the company that pays for the workspace owns its content, as the employee messages guide explains from copyright law. Second, a buyer will ask whether any vendor has already trained on your data, because exclusivity is worth less if it has; buyers' counsel ask that question as a matter of course ( vendor already trained). For Slack's generative models the answer, on its own terms, is no unless you opted in.

Nothing in Slack's terms forbids a company from licensing its own export. We have not found a clause in Slack's export pages, API terms or privacy principles that bars a customer from licensing content it exported itself. What the terms do is put conditions on getting private messages out, and keep third-party apps out of the pipeline. Slack can change its terms, and the main services agreement governs the subscription itself; read your own order form if you signed one, and our Slack terms record holds every quote we rely on, with the date it was read.

4. Whose messages are in it: employees, customers and other companies

Ownership is rarely what stops a Slack sale. Under US copyright law, a work " prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" is a work made for hire, and the employer is considered the author. What stops it is the people in the messages, and the promises the company made to them and about them. The employee messages guide treats this in depth; what follows is what matters most for Slack.

Employees. A workspace is mostly staff talking to staff. The federal Stored Communications Act lets the provider of a communications service authorize access to what it stores: its access offense does not apply to conduct authorized "by the person or entity providing a wire or electronic communications service", and its ban on divulging stored contents applies only to a provider of service "to the public", which a company's internal Slack is not. Several states require notice before an employer monitors electronic communications: New York's Civil Rights Law 52-c, Connecticut's 31-48d, Delaware's 19 Del. C. 705 and Maine's 26 M.R.S. 620-A. These laws govern notice, not licensing, but a company that never gave the required notice has a weaker answer to every question about its staff's expectations. California is the one to watch: its staff have had full privacy rights over their work data since the employee exemption became inoperative on 1 January 2023, and buyers' counsel ask how California employees' rights were handled. Employees in the EU need a lawful basis for the use ( EU employees), and conversations about pay, conditions or organizing raise labor-law questions ( union activity).

The practical test for DMs is Slack's own: on Business+ the applicant must ensure appropriate employment agreements and policies. Read your acceptable-use policy and handbook for what they told staff about direct messages. A policy that says the company may access all workspace content, including DMs, is the start of an answer; a policy written only for security investigations is weaker evidence for a licence to a third party. Many holders decide to leave DMs out entirely, and buyers accept that: Polyshares calls a public-channel export a valid starting point.

Customers. Customers appear in Slack in three ways: pasted into internal channels (a support lead quoting a complaint, an account manager pasting an email), in shared Slack Connect channels with customer companies, and in channels fed by integrations from your helpdesk or CRM. Each brings the customer's agreement with you into the sale. If your terms of service or data processing agreement say you process customer content only to serve the customer, licensing it to an AI buyer breaks that promise. Buyers' counsel ask whether customer content is excluded or covered by the agreements, and whether the privacy policy in force when the data was collected allowed this kind of transfer. The usual answer for Slack is to exclude the channels fed by customer systems and the shared channels with customers, and to de-identify customer names pasted into internal threads.

Other companies. Shared channels with vendors, agencies, investors and partners hold other companies' information, often received under an NDA that limits its use to the relationship. Buyers' counsel ask whether shared channels and partner material are excluded or reviewed. The Spirit Airlines records sale, the largest on record, drew objections from five third parties over their own data inside it, and the lesson buyers draw from it is to exclude or review that material before anything is licensed. Slack makes the exclusion easy to do: shared channels are marked as such, and you can leave every Slack Connect channel out of the export.

Privileged and sensitive material. Messages with your lawyers, about litigation, HR matters, health, or performance reviews do not belong in a licence. Buyers ask whether privileged and trade-secret material has been removed. In Slack this usually means named channels (#legal, #people-ops, #exec), private channels set up for an investigation, and DMs with counsel. The employee data inside records is also what slows sales most: the Spirit hearing was adjourned repeatedly while employee matters were worked out.

A useful way to set scope is a channel list. Export the channel audit report (Business+ and Enterprise) or list the channels yourself, and mark each one: in scope, out of scope (legal, HR, customer-fed, shared with another company), or to review. That list becomes the scope of the licence and the first page of your rights file.

5. De-identifying a Slack export

Every buyer that takes company communications expects personal data to be removed before or as part of delivery. The question is who does it, to what standard, and when. Buyers differ. Scale says it anonymises inside your own systems before anything is extracted. Turing removes personal data and secrets itself, in isolated processing, and you approve the scope first. Polyshares' Slack guide says you do not need to clean or scrub an export, because it handles anonymization before anything moves. Corpus Bridge says the de-identification standard is negotiated with the buyer and you approve it before delivery. Each of those models means someone other than you reads your raw messages first, so decide which you accept before you choose a buyer.

Slack exports have particular shapes that a de-identifier must handle:

• User IDs and display names. The export keeps a users file mapping Slack user IDs to names, emails and titles. Messages refer to people by ID and by @mention. Replace the mapping with stable pseudonyms so threads still show who replied to whom, which is what buyers value, while the names are gone.
• Names inside message text. People write each other's names, customers' names and phone numbers into messages. These need text-level detection, not just a swap of the users file.
• Links and file names. URLs to internal documents, customer portals and file names often carry names or account numbers.
• Secrets. Engineers paste API keys, passwords and database connection strings into Slack. These must come out, whatever the buyer's standard.
• Sensitive topics. Health, family matters, beliefs and union activity appear in casual chat. A content screen removes records about health, children, beliefs, union membership and other special categories rather than trying to mask them line by line.

California's law has its own definition of deidentified information, with public commitments and contractual bans on re-identification attached ( CCPA deidentification). Our de-identification standard sets out the method we advise: removal before anything leaves you, by you or an independent provider you choose, with a group-size floor of 11 for any delivery and 300 random records read by a person before it goes. Our free de-identification tool runs in your own browser, so the messages never leave your computer, and on company Slack, email and documents it measured an F1 of 86.8%, finding 95.8% of people's identifiers. No tool is perfect, which is why the standard pairs it with a person's review and an independent certificate before transfer.

De-identification and exclusion work together. Exclusion removes whole channels and conversations that cannot be licensed (legal, HR, shared with customers); de-identification makes what remains safe to deliver. Do exclusion first: it is cheaper, it is auditable from the channel list, and it shrinks what the de-identifier has to read.

6. What buyers pay for company records that include Slack

No buyer we have read publishes a price per Slack message or per workspace alone. They price the company's whole working record, in which Slack is one of the systems, and they price it higher when Slack is included. Here is what the public record shows for records that name Slack.

Across every public offer for one company's records, the middle half sits at $174K to $693K per company. The middle of the buyers' offers is $316K per company, and the median of the sales that actually happened is $28.3K per company. Published tiers sit above what closes, partly because sales are disclosed more often for small closed companies, and the prices guide explains the gap.

Three patterns in those rows matter for a Slack holder.

Slack raises the price of the whole package. Ooak's estimator values a 51 to 100 person operating company with four or more years at $85k to $121k with six tools including Slack, against $16k to $22k with only Jira, GitHub and HubSpot. The difference is not all Slack (Google Drive and Gmail are also missing in the smaller set), but it shows how buyers treat communications: as the connective tissue that makes the rest worth more. That is the same point micro1's revenue chief made: without the communications systems, the rest of the corpus is less valuable.

Closed companies get less, and less every month. The market pays for a closed or closing company's records about 0.65 times what it pays for the same company operating, in part because closed companies sell in a hurry and their records are often incomplete. Turing's intake says records depreciate fast once operations cease, naming 30 days for Slack. Section 8 covers what to do about it.

The first offer is rarely the best. Business Insider reported in October 2026 that small businesses receive six-figure offers that expire in 48 hours for their internal records. A buyer told MIT Technology Review the same week that buyers quote very differently because they buy on different theses, which is why refusing a short deadline and collecting several offers is the single most useful thing a holder can do. Our valuation puts a range on your own company from these records before you talk to any buyer, with no upload.

7. Preparing and delivering a Slack export

The preparation guide sets out the full order for any company's records. For Slack, it comes down to these steps, most of which need no buyer at all.

1. Confirm your plan and roles. Note the plan, the date the workspace was created, whether it was ever on Free (and when), and who holds the top workspace role. If the plan is Free, export now: every day deletes another day of history.
2. Count before you export. Read messages sent and files uploaded in workspace analytics, split by public channels, private channels and DMs, and the number of members. Polyshares' intake and Turing's both start from counts per system, and estimates are fine at that stage.
3. List the channels and set scope. Mark each channel in scope, out of scope or to review, using section 4: legal, HR, executive, customer-fed and shared channels usually come out. Decide whether private channels and DMs are in scope at all; leaving them out is a legitimate choice buyers accept.
4. Run the export yourself. Use Slack's admin export, from your own workspace, run by your own administrator. Choose the full date range. For private channels and DMs on Business+ or Enterprise, apply first and record the approval. Never install a buyer's app to pull the history.
5. Download the shared files you want to include while the links still work, or export them from their source systems, because the export holds only links.
6. Keep the export whole. Do not edit the JSON by hand. Keep the users file, the channels file and the per-day message files, so threads, replies and reactions stay intact, which is what Scale asks for when it wants reply structure preserved intact.
7. Exclude, then de-identify. Remove out-of-scope channels from the copy, then de-identify the rest to the standard you chose (section 5). Draw any sample for a buyer from the de-identified copy, never from the raw export.
8. Write down how you did it. Who exported what, when, from which plan, with which approvals, which channels were excluded and why, and who de-identified. This becomes your rights file, and it is your proof of title: buyers have been offered stolen archives, and one buyer described being offered a large company's codebase by a group that did not have the rights to sell this data.
9. Agree delivery and acceptance in the licence. The format (Slack's JSON as exported, or a converted form), who de-identifies and to which standard, objective acceptance criteria and a review window.

Keep two things apart in your mind: what you describe to buyers, and what you deliver. Buyers price from the description first: counts, years, channels, the share of threads with replies, what links to what, and what stays out. Polyshares says it reads an anonymised sample before it prices. The full export moves only after a licence is signed, and only the scope the licence names.

8. A closed company's Slack

A closed company is the most common holder of a valuable Slack workspace, and the one with the least time. Three questions decide whether its Slack can still be sold: does the history still exist, who can sign, and who can run the export.

Does the history still exist? A paid workspace keeps its history while it is paid for. When a closing company stops paying, the workspace drops to the free plan, and Slack starts deleting everything older than one year, on a rolling basis. Pro workspaces that were once free do not get back what was deleted before an upgrade. Turing's intake puts the useful life of Slack after operations cease at 30 days. So the first act of any wind-down that may sell its records is to keep the Slack plan paid, or to run the full export before the plan lapses. The deletion clock shows the dates for each of your systems.

Who can sign? The company sells, not its founders personally, and the right person signs for it. Buyers' counsel ask for the legal entity that collected the data to be the licensor, with the board's approval, and, for a wind-down, the dissolution documents and any required investor consents. In Delaware, where many US startups are incorporated, a dissolved corporation continues for three years to wind up its affairs, including disposing of its property, and its officers and directors can still act for it in that period; it must adopt a plan of distribution that provides for its claims first. In a chapter 7 bankruptcy the trustee signs, because the trustee's duty is to collect and reduce to money the property of the estate, and a sale that includes personally identifiable information runs through section 363(b)(1) and its privacy conditions. Buyers ask that the right officeholder signs. Our estates page sets out the path for trustees, assignees and dissolved companies, and the guide to SimpleClosure and its alternatives compares the wind-down services that also sell records.

Who can run the export? The person who held the top workspace role may have left. Transfer the role to an officer or the trustee before you need it, because Business+ applications wait on that person's approval, and an Enterprise org needs an org administrator to ask Slack Support. If nobody with access remains, Slack Support is the route, and the company will need to show it still exists and who acts for it.

A closed company's Slack also carries the same people questions as an operating one, with one difference: the staff are gone and harder to reach for consent. That pushes most closed companies toward public channels plus thorough de-identification, and away from DMs. The value is still real: the cielo24 records, built over more than a decade, sold for what SimpleClosure describes as mid-six figures during the wind-down.

9. How a sale through AIData.Broker works

AIData.Broker represents companies selling their data to AI buyers. We act only for the holder, as its agent in the sale, for holders based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. For a Slack holder, a sale through us runs like this.

The valuation comes first, with no upload. The valuation asks about your systems (Slack plan, years, seats, which channels are in scope, what else the company ran) and returns a range from the public records in section 6. If you add an export, it is measured on your own computer. The valuation binds no one.

You keep the data and deliver it yourself. We do not hold your Slack export, show any part of it to a buyer, or license it in our name. You, or a de-identification provider you choose, deliver directly to the buyer, and the buyer pays you directly. That keeps your export inside the route Slack's terms allow: your own admin export, never a connector.

Every buyer that fits sees it at once. Every buyer whose published requirements fit your records receives a description that does not identify you; each that gives its confidentiality undertaking receives the same datasheet, with one deadline for offers. Offers come back on the same terms, so you can compare price, de-identification model, payment timing and exclusivity side by side. Our free offer check reads any offer you already have against the published terms of the buyers we track.

The fee is due only out of money you receive. It is a success fee on what you are actually paid, band by band: 15% of the first $250,000, 10% from $250,000 to $1 million, and 6% above $1 million. On a $300,000 sale the fee is $42,500. Mandates are exclusive for 2 months, with a tail of 12 months for buyers we introduced, and we do not take mandates where the expected sale is below $50,000. Several buyers publish an introduction fee; in a sale we run we decline it and ask the buyer to add it to your price instead, so we earn the same whichever buyer you choose. How it works sets out every step and term.

Questions people ask

Can I sell my company's Slack data to AI companies? Yes, if the company exports it itself through Slack's admin export, takes out what cannot be licensed (legal, HR, customer and shared channels), de-identifies the rest, and the right person signs for the company. Buyers such as Scale and Polyshares name Slack among the systems they want ( Scale, Polyshares).

Do Slack's terms allow it? Slack's API terms bar an app offered to other organizations from using what it pulls to train a large language model or to bulk export. They do not govern your own admin export, and we have found no Slack clause that bars a company from licensing content it exported itself. Private channels and DMs come out only on Slack's conditions ( export by plan).

Can we export DMs and private channels on Free or Pro? Only by application, which Slack rejects unless you show valid legal process, consent of members, or a requirement or right under law. On Business+ an approved application opens a self-serve export, and Enterprise orgs ask Slack Support to enable it.

Does a Slack export include the files people shared? No. Standard exports hold links to files, not the files themselves, and on Free only for the last 90 days. Download the files that matter while the workspace is live.

How much is a company's Slack worth? Buyers price the whole working record rather than Slack alone. Public offers for one company's records have a middle half of $174K to $693K per company, and the median of disclosed sales is $28.3K per company. Polyshares states $100K to $2M and above for an operating record that includes Slack. The valuation gives a range for yours.

Should we let a buyer connect an app to our Slack? No. An app offered outside your organization may not use API data to train a large language model, and buyers' counsel treat data pulled through a connector as a red flag. Export it yourself.

Do employees have to consent? US law does not generally require it for the public channels of a workspace the company owns, though notice laws and California's rules apply ( California employees). For DMs on Free and Pro, members' consent is one of the three grounds Slack accepts. Read the employee messages guide for the full answer.

Our company has closed. Can we still sell its Slack? Often yes, if the history still exists and the right person signs: in Delaware a dissolved corporation continues for three years to wind up, and in bankruptcy the trustee acts. Keep the plan paid or export before it lapses; see the estates page.

Does Slack train its own AI on our messages? Slack says it will not use Customer Data to train generative AI models unless the customer opts in, though it uses customer data for some non-generative features such as search and suggestions, with an opt-out.

What this means for you

Your Slack workspace is probably the most valuable record your company holds, and also the most fragile. It is valuable because it is the only place where the company's real work, with its questions, its answers and its links to code and tickets, was written down as it happened; buyers name it and pay more for records that include it. It is fragile because Slack decides what comes out on each plan, because a free workspace deletes a day of history every day, and because the messages are full of people who never agreed to anything.

So do four things now, before any buyer conversation. Check your plan and keep it paid. Count your workspace by public channels, private channels and DMs. List your channels and mark what stays out. And get a range for the whole record from the valuation, so that the first offer you see is measured against the market rather than against nothing. Then export it yourself, de-identify it to a standard you chose, and put it before every buyer that fits at once. The rest of the What sells section shows the other records buyers pay for beside Slack.