Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? (Haven't used it in forever, so I don't know).

Being able to

grep -A3 -i foobox -r /nfs/info | grep -i rpc

is useful. Similarly, you can shove plaintext into a more advanced search engine easily.

> Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON?

I think you can, the main issues are that:

- Conversations aren't forced to be threaded, and there is no way to go back and do anything with conversations that weren't threaded; it's just lost data.

- Because Slack doesn't export data into a standardized format, there isn't a big ecosystem of tools to do stuff with Slack data. And it's not clear that there will be in the future either -- Slack's growth has started slowing substantially and it's only around 13M DAU, which isn't really big enough to build a business on top of.

Part of the problem with slack is it sells itself to small conversations, fast responses, the "im" type. It is all good and well, but email lets you think slightly more and keep topics contained and searchable.

13m DAUs at $6.67 per month is $86,710,000/month, or $1,040,520,000/year - seems like a pretty big business to me!

Yeah if you can get 13M people paying you then obviously you're doing amazing, but even Slack only has 6M paid seats.

But I meant more like if you can get 1 / 1,000 email users paying you $10 bucks a month then that's $480,000 per year, whereas 1 / 1,000 Slack users is $1,560 per year.