Slack Pro, 12 seats → Rocket.Chat, self-hosted
Marginal. At $50 an hour, Rocket.Chat saves you $102 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$52.22/hrBelow that rate, moving to Rocket.Chat pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Slack Pro.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Slack Pro $7.25/month × 12 seats, billed annual | $87.00 |
| Every month | $87.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 40 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.28 |
| Your time 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $70.28 |
| Migration, once 10 hours of your time, our estimate | $500.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $16.72 |
| After one year | −$299 |
| After 3 years | $102 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs Rocket.Chat from $4.90/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Rocket.Chat their published minimum for this app | $4.90 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $4.90 |
| Migration, once 5 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $250.00 |
| After 3 years, against Slack Pro | $2,706 |
At $50 an hour that saves $2,706 over 3 years, against $102 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Rocket.Chat and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Vultr box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Slack's 2,600-app directory and the integrations your team already installed
- Huddles and clip — the low-friction audio/video that keeps people out of meetings
- Someone else handling the next security patch on a chat server that faces the internet
You gain
- No per-seat charge, so guests and whole departments stop costing money per head
- Unlimited message history — the Free-tier 90-day limit and the Pro-tier pins both go away
- Matrix federation and an API you can automate against without approval
Read this before you decide
- Rocket.Chat's community edition carries most of the product, but some features (LDAP, audit, OAuth enterprise) are enterprise-licensed — check your must-haves against their edition matrix before committing.
- Chat history grows fast. The 40 GB backup assumption fits a chatty 12-person team for about two years; re-check if you migrate years of logs in.
- Migration means re-creating channels and re-inviting people — Slack does not export member relationships to a competitor. The 10-hour estimate is for a 12-seat workspace, not a 200-seat one.
Is the project alive?
RocketChat/Rocket.Chat has 46,288 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (8.9.0) 14 days ago. Its licence is not one GitHub recognises automatically, so check the repository before you rely on it. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Slack figure is the site's own wording: “$7.25 USD per user / month, when paying annually”.
| Slack pricing page | 11 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| RocketChat/Rocket.Chat activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.