Slack could get a free rival from Microsoft

In a bid to further challenge Slack, Microsoft Teams could be getting a free tier, according to the rumor mill.

Petri reports that there are several references to a ‘freemium tier’ in the latest developer preview version of Teams, and therefore it looks likely that Microsoft intends to offer the service as a freebie to those who aren’t Office 365 subscribers.

Of course, Slack has a free offering, and the idea would be to poach customers from that piece of turf (as well as other rivals), get them using Microsoft’s service and hopefully entice them to subscribe to Office 365 eventually.

Chatty limits

As ever, the free version will have limits to further persuade users to upgrade in order to free themselves of said shackles, and Petri cites a ‘storage exceeded’ warning which was spotted as an example. So you’ll have limited storage with a free account, and likely other restrictions such as a limited chat history and so forth.

Bear in mind that this is still very much speculation at this point, although it certainly wouldn’t hurt Microsoft to make this move if it wants to achieve greater exposure for its business chat service.

Microsoft has already taken action with the aim of making Teams a one-stop-shop for all your meeting needs within Office 365, including rolling the Skype for Business service into Teams.

Meanwhile, as of last October, Office 365 has some 28 million consumer subscribers, and over 120 million commercial users.

• Maybe you’ll use Microsoft Teams on one of our best business laptops

Via The Verge

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