File sharing & storage
File sharing looks free until you bump retention caps, then admins are either deleting old uploads by hand or paying extra to keep them.
What people actually say
✕Free workspaces cap file storage at 5 GB across the entire workspace — once you hit it, new uploads fail and admins have to manually delete old files to make space.
Source: Slack, Free plan feature limitations ↗✕Users describe constantly running into the 5 GB ceiling sharing screenshots and videos, calling the cleanup workflow tedious and risky — easy to delete the wrong thing.
Source: sto.care, File too big for Slack ↗
Uploads go straight to your own S3 (or Cloudflare R2) bucket via presigned URLs, with thumbnails generated by a small Lambda or Vercel function. Retention is a Postgres column and a nightly job, not a tier upsell — and storage cost is fractions of a cent per GB, not a forced plan upgrade.