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Create Free Slack Pro Alternative with AI Summaries & Google Drive Archiving

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Created by: OwenLee || owen-n8nlab

OwenLee

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Last update 11 hours ago

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Description

💸💬 Slack Pro is powerful — but the price hurts, especially for growing teams. This workflow is designed as a low-cost alternative solution that provides some Slack Pro functions (searchable history + AI summaries) while you stay on the free Slack plan (or minimal paid seats).

What is the advantage?

  • 🧠 AI Slack assistant on demand – @mention the bot in any channel to get clear summaries of recent discussions (“yesterday”, “last 7 days”, “this week”, etc.).
  • 🗄️ External message history – recent messages are routinely saved into Google Drive, so important conversations live outside Slack’s 90-day / 10k-message limit.
  • 💰 Cost-efficient setup – rely on Slack free plan + a little Google Drive storage + low-cost AI API, instead of paying Slack Pro ($8.75 USD per user / month).
  • 📚 Business value – you keep the benefits you wanted from Slack Pro (memory, context, easy catch-up) while avoiding a big monthly bill.

🧠 Upgrade your Slack for free with AI chat summaries & history archiving

👥 Who’s it for

  • 💰 Teams stuck on Slack Free because Pro is too expensive (e.g. founders, small teams)
    • Want longer history and better context, but can’t justify per-seat upgrades.
    • Need “Pro-like” benefits (search, memory, recap) in a budget-friendly way.

⚙️ How it works

  • 📝 Slack stays as your main chat tool: People talk in channels the way they already do.
  • 🤖 You add a bot powered by this workflow: When someone @mentions it with something like (@SlackHistoryBot summarize this week).
  • 📆 On a schedule (e.g. monthly), it backs up channels: Walks through channels the bot can access and saves recent messages (e.g. last 30 days) as a CSV file into Google Drive.

🛠️ How to set up

  1. 🔑 Connect credentials (once)

    • Slack (Bot / App): recommend other tutorial video
      • Create and configure a bot.
      • Create a credential.
      • Invite the bot to channels you want to cover.
    • Google Drive
      • Connect a Google account for storage.
      • Create a folder like Slack History (Archived) in Drive and select it in the workflow.
    • AI Provider (e.g. DeepSeek)
      • Grab any LLM API key.
      • Plug it into the AI node so summaries use that model.
  2. 🚀 Quick Start

    • Import the JSON workflow.
    • Attach your credentials.
    • Save and activate the workflow.
    • Try a real-world test:
      • In a test channel, have a short conversation.
      • Then try @(your bot name) summarize today.
    • Check that archives appear:
      • Manually trigger the “archive” part from your automation tool.
      • You should see files named after your channels and time period in Google Drive.

🧰 How to Customize the Workflow

  1. Limit where it runs
    • Only invite the bot to “high value” channels (projects, clients, leadership).
    • This keeps both AI and storage usage under control.
  2. Adjust archive frequency
    • Monthly is usually enough; weekly only for critical channels.
    • Less frequent archives = fewer operations = lower cost.
  3. **Customize the summary style (system prompt) **📃
    • What language to use (e.g. Chinese by default, or English, or both).
    • How to structure the summary (topics, bullets, separators).
    • What to focus on (projects, decisions, tasks, risks, etc.).

📩 Help & customize other slack function

Contact: [email protected]