“Free” in team chat usually means free until it matters. Free until day 91, when your history disappears behind a paywall. Free until the eleventh person joins. Free until you need the admin feature you assumed was table stakes. Fluid Chat is free in the older, less exciting sense: the thing costs nothing and there is no second thing.
All 91 features are in the free product, for every person on your team, forever, whether you self-host it or use the hosted version.
The four kinds of “free”, ranked by how annoyed you'll be later
It helps to name the pattern before you get caught in it, so here's the taxonomy of free tiers in this category:
- 1Free-until-you-remember. You get everything, but only the last 90 days of it. Your history isn't deleted — it's just held somewhere you can't reach without a subscription. Slack's free plan is the famous example.
- 2Free-until-you-hire. Unlimited features, capped users. Fine at eight people. A budget line at twenty-six.
- 3Free-until-you-grow-up. Unlimited people and history, but the audit log, retention policy and SSO — the things a real company eventually needs — live two tiers up.
- 4Free. No history limit, no seat cap, no feature gates, no card field. Rarer than it should be, largely because it's a hard business model unless the software is open source and self-hostable.
What “unlimited” means here, precisely
Vague generosity is how free tiers become disappointing, so here are the actual numbers.
| Fluid Chat (free) | Typical free chat plan | |
|---|---|---|
| People in the workspace | Unlimited, uncounted | Often capped |
| Messages | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Message history you can read | All of it, forever | Commonly the last 90 days |
| Channels | Unlimited | Usually unlimited |
| Integrations | Unlimited | Often capped at ~10 |
| Audit log | Included | Paid tier |
| Retention policies | Included | Paid tier |
| Guest accounts | Included | Paid tier |
| Full data export | Included | Limited on free |
| Credit card required | No card field exists | Usually on file |
The one place with real numbers attached: file storage on the hosted version. Uploads are capped at 10 MiB each and 100 MiB of active files per workspace, uploads expire after 15 days and workspace exports after 7 — that's what keeps object storage costs sane for a free hosted product. Self-host and those limits are yours to change or delete entirely.
The features nobody usually gives away free
The interesting part of a free plan isn't the messaging — everyone gives you messaging. It's the governance layer, which is where most vendors put the upgrade prompt. Fluid includes all of it:
- Roles — owner, admin, member, guest, with guests scoped to their own channels.
- Audit log covering the administrative actions you'd want to reconstruct after the fact.
- Message retention policies, configurable per workspace.
- Per-workspace read-only mode and per-channel posting policy.
- Reusable invite links with limits, plus email invitations.
- API keys with explicit scopes, per-key rate limits, rotation and expiry.
- Full data export — JSONL, CSV and a file manifest for the whole workspace.
That last one is the tell. A free plan that won't let you export everything isn't free, it's a deposit.
Free for small teams and startups, specifically
If you're under about thirty people, the pitch is simple: you get the tooling a 500-person company pays for, at the price a two-person company can afford, without a sales call in the middle of it.
- No card field anywhere, so nothing renews by surprise and nobody has to expense it.
- No trial clock. There's no “14 days left” banner because there's nothing on the other side of it.
- No seat maths before hiring. Adding a contractor is adding a contractor, not a line item.
- No upgrade prompt in the product, because there is nothing to upgrade to.
- An exit that works. Full export on the free plan means switching later is a decision, not a hostage negotiation.
So what's the catch?
There's a real one, and it isn't billing — it's scope. Fluid deliberately doesn't do several things:
- No huddles, voice or video.
- No SSO/SAML.
- No Slack Connect for talking to other companies.
- No native iOS or Android apps — the web client uses a drawer layout and is genuinely usable on a phone, but it's a web client.
- No Slack importer yet. Getting data out of Fluid is solved; getting Slack's archive in is the open piece.
Those are listed here, on the pricing-adjacent page, rather than discovered in week three. If any of them is a dealbreaker, you've saved an afternoon. If none of them is, you've found a free chat product with no asterisk.
Start a workspace. There is no card field to find.
Free hosted, free self-hosted, same code. Or read the source first — that's the point of it being open.
Will it stay free?
The structural answer is more convincing than a promise: the project is open source and built to be self-hosted, and a self-hosted install has nothing to meter. If a paid hosted plan with support ever appears, it would sit alongside the free product rather than carve features out of it — and even in the worst case, the version you already cloned keeps running and nobody can reach it.