Not sure if this answers you question about how Discord can afford it while Slack can't, but the topic of how they store all those messages was addressed very w

Not sure if this answers you question about how Discord can afford it while Slack can't, but the topic of how they store all those messages was addressed very well in this article. https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m... Based on the description given in that article it's a technical hassle to store that many messages, and it could be Slack just thought it didn't want to deal with that.