Built for community, not internal teams.
Slack is excellent at what it was built for: workplace conversation between colleagues who share an office calendar. Paid communities aren't shaped that way. Members aren't all online during business hours, they're not on payroll, and your community isn't a team.
Built for teams, not communities.
Slack was designed around a specific assumption: everyone in the workspace is part of the same organisation, more or less online during the same hours, and getting paid to be there. That shape works for internal teams. It's a poor fit for paid communities.
- Members aren’t on payroll. They’re paying you.
- Most members aren’t online during business hours.
- People come and go on their own schedules.
- The conversations are between members who don’t share a calendar, a manager, or a Monday standup.
How the two compare.
| Capability | Midway | Slack |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Member-to-member chat in membership sites | Internal team communication |
| Auth | Native Memberstack, uses existing logins | Members create or accept a Slack invite |
| Lives | Inside your Webflow site | On slack.com, off-site |
| Free message history | Unlimited | Last 90 days only (since Sept 2022) |
| Voice notes | Recorded in-browser | Huddles are live-only |
| Per-member cost | Flat per project | Per active user, per month |
| Brand fit | Themed to your site | Slack purple, Slack everything |
What community-scale chat costs.
Slack Pro is $7.25 per active user per month on annual billing. That model makes sense when active users are billable employees. It doesn't make sense when active users are your community members.
| Active members | Slack Pro / month | Midway Studio / month |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | $362.50 | $0 (Free plan) |
| 500 | $3,625 | $49.99 |
| 2,000 | $14,500 | $49.99 |
Slack figures use the standard annual-billing rate of $7.25/user/month from slack.com/pricing. Promotional pricing may be offered from time to time. The comparison uses the standard rate. Slack’s free plan exists for small communities. Once you grow past it, per-seat pricing scales against you.
What happens when your community history disappears.
In September 2022, Slack cut free-plan message history from unlimited to 90 days. Midway doesn't cap message history. On Free, Starter, or Studio, your messages stay until you delete them.
“A massive negative impact for a lot of communities relying on the free plan. Losing things after 90 days makes a huge difference.”
Verbatim community sentiment, Twitter, 2022, on the Slack free-plan history change.
Attachments on Midway auto-delete after 90 days to keep storage predictable, but the messages themselves persist. See the pricing FAQ.
Which one is right for you?
Internal teams, bots, and tech-adjacent crowds.
- Internal team chat for your business operations.
- Tech-adjacent communities where members already live in Slack all day.
- Heavy use of bots, integrations, webhooks.
- You don't mind members chatting off your site, and you're fine with the 90-day history cap or paying per active member.
Paid communities that live on your site.
- You're running a paid community on Memberstack and Webflow.
- Members are course students, coaching clients, alumni, hobbyists, not tech colleagues.
- You want chat on your site, on your brand, with the Memberstack login they already have.
- You want voice notes, replies, reactions. The chat shapes people use outside of work.
- You don't want a per-active-member bill or a 90-day history cliff.
What people ask before switching.
For paying community use cases, yes. For internal team operations, no. Slack is excellent at that and Midway isn't built for it.
Yes. Most teams do. Slack for your internal operations (your team, contractors, ops). Midway for your paying community on your site. They serve different audiences.
Slack Connect lets external people into your workspace, but it still requires them to have or create a Slack account, accept an invite, and switch contexts. Midway's Memberstack-native auth removes that friction. Your members chat as their existing member identity.
Persistent public channels with bots and integrations aren't on the near-term roadmap. The shape of chat we're building is closer to WhatsApp than to Slack, by design. Focused on member-to-member messaging on your site.
No 90-day cliff. No per-seat tax.
Flat per-project pricing. Every messaging feature on Free. Your members chat as their Memberstack identity, on your site.