Give your budget some Slack.
Same channels, threads, and DMs your team already knows — minus the per-seat bill, the 90-day memory wall, and customer data being used for ML by default. Voice, video, and meetings included at every tier. Even the free one.
Slack wrote the modern team-chat playbook. Great playbook. We kept it — then halved the bill, bundled voice, video, and meetings so you can cancel Zoom, threw the encryption keys to your users (we don't read your messages), and built notifications that deliver directly instead of batching. Oh, and the Free tier doesn't forget what you said 91 days ago.
Feature-by-feature
Don't take our word for it — self-host it free and see for yourself.
The bill, over time
5 years, 50 users, with SSO. Cumulative list-price spend. Both lines plotted in €; competitor converted at $1 ≈ €0.92.
List prices, annual billing. Discounts, negotiated terms, and FX drift may vary.
Why teams choose TheChatApp
- →Your 15th hire doesn't renegotiate your bill. Pricing is by team size, not by headcount. Grow without flinching.
- →Voice, video, meetings, and calendar — all built in. No Zoom subscription. No Google Meet add-on. One bill, one app, everything works.
- →The Free tier remembers everything. No 90-day memory wall. No 'upgrade to read last quarter's incident thread.'
- →Notifications that deliver directly. Mention acknowledgements. A priority system that surfaces what actually matters.
- →Encrypted end-to-end by default. We don't read your messages, don't scan them, and don't train AI on them.
- →Your data leaves when you do. Self-host export, GDPR export, full message history — no ransom, no lock-in.
- →Self-host on the hardware you already own. That 2015 laptop in your closet? It can run 100+ users. We're not kidding.
- →GDPR-native. Built in the EU, hosted in the EU. Not patched in after the fines.
Frequently asked questions
Is TheChatApp really a Slack alternative?
Yes. Channels, threads, DMs, mentions, files, voice, video, search — the whole team-chat workflow Slack made famous. We skipped the per-seat pricing tax, the 90-day memory wall, the server-side key custody, the notifications that freeze and dump, and the 'we use your data for ML features' fine print. Plus voice, video, and meetings are built in — no separate Zoom or Google Meet subscription.
How much cheaper is TheChatApp than Slack, really?
At 10 users on annual billing, Cloud Team is €290/year vs Slack Pro at roughly $870/year — about 3× cheaper. At 50 users, Cloud Business is €1,690/year vs $4,350/year — roughly 2.6× cheaper. At 50 users with SSO, €1,989/year vs $9,000/year for Slack Business+ — about 4.9× cheaper. And that's just Slack. Most Slack teams also pay for Zoom or Google Meet for real meetings — add Zoom Pro ($7,998/year at 50 users) and you're looking at $16,998/year vs our €1,989. Pricing is capacity-based, so the per-user cost keeps dropping as your team grows inside a tier.
Wait, it runs on a potato?
Close enough. TheChatApp self-host is a single lightweight .NET server with a small Go SFU sidecar for meetings. A mid-range laptop or a €10/month VPS comfortably handles 100+ concurrent users. No Kubernetes cluster required. No Elasticsearch node eating a quarter of your RAM. If your team lives in a converted garage with a ThinkPad from 2015, you're good.
Does TheChatApp actually encrypt messages end-to-end?
Yes — end-to-end by default, for every channel and every DM. In our zero-knowledge mode, the server holds no long-term keys — it can't decrypt your messages even if someone got access to the disk. Slack stores your messages server-side and can read them. That's a structural difference, not a marketing one.
Do you train AI on my chat?
No. We don't train our own models on your messages. We don't ship your content to a third-party model provider. Our search runs locally on your device — your laptop does the thinking, not our servers. It's not a setting you need to find and flip. It's the architecture.
What does 'GDPR-native' actually mean?
It means the compliance requirements shaped the architecture, not the other way around. EU-based company, EU-hosted cloud, privacy-compliant by default, data subject requests wired into the product (self-service export, deletion, rectification), DPA signable without a sales call. Slack is a US company subject to US surveillance law. That's fine for some teams. Not fine for others.
Can I self-host the way I would with Mattermost?
Yes. First-class self-hosted server, one-time license with optional annual maintenance. Messages, files, audit logs — all on your infrastructure. Slack is cloud-only. Their cloud. Their rules.
Can I actually leave if I want to? What about my data?
Yes. Self-host means your data is already on your infrastructure — export it anytime. On cloud, GDPR export gives you a full machine-readable archive of your messages, files, and metadata. No paywall on your own history. No 'contact sales to get your data.' Slack locks history behind tier upgrades and has no self-host escape hatch. We think your chat history is yours, not a retention lever.
Why should I trust a smaller vendor over Slack?
You don't have to. Self-host the whole thing. Keep your data on your infrastructure. If we vanished tomorrow, your server keeps running — the license is one-time, not a subscription to our existence. On cloud, you can export all your data at any time — full GDPR export, no paywall, no sales call. Either way, your data is always yours to take. That's the actual point: sovereignty, not savings.
See how TheChatApp fits your team
Try the Free tier on your own server, or start a managed Cloud workspace in minutes.
Comparison drawn from publicly available pricing and documentation as of April 2026. Slack pricing fetched from slack.com/pricing; feature capabilities verified against Slack's documentation and published AI/ML data-use policies. Re-verify vendor pricing before quoting in procurement.
Also available: Slack · Microsoft Teams · Mattermost · Rocket.Chat