If you're evaluating Relay against Slack on cost, here's the math. Per-seat rent vs per-server ownership, a sizing chart at 10 / 25 / 50 / 100 seats, and an illustrative 500-person comparison at the bottom. The rest of Relay's story — what it actually is, how integrations work, and how Yee joined a room over a WebSocket in under a day — lives at /relay/.
Pricing
A 10-person team on Slack Pro pays $72.50/month. That same team on Relay BYOI rides a single small server in the single-digit dollars per month — pass-through infra, not per-seat rent. Want zero ops? Relay Cloud is the same transparent server bill plus 20% — we run it 100% (uptime, backups, patches, upgrades). Talk to us for sizing and the underlying numbers.
The default team chat playbook: every hire raises the tab, history and APIs follow paid tiers, and there is no self-hosted escape hatch — you rent the app, the roadmap, and the integration marketplace forever.
Add-on
An optional managed Postgres archive sits behind your room API for the long tail of message history, plus point-in-time recovery snapshots. Pick who holds the connection string: you, or us. Pricing and the underlying provider are part of the conversation when you sign on — get in touch for a quote.
Paste a Postgres URL into Relay. You pay your provider directly; we route cold archive and DR targets to your database — no markup on the underlying line items.
We provision, monitor, and operate the archive side — pass-through pricing on the underlying database plus 20% for our lifecycle work (scaling cues, failover drills, credential rotation, on-call). Same transparency model as Relay Cloud on the chat tier.
Optional on every workspace. Stacks with Relay BYOI or Relay Cloud — flip the toggle above; this add-on is orthogonal.
While we’re here: enterprise Slack is a procurement saga, a SSO tax, a 90-day history ransom on “free,” and a marketplace of integrations you could ship yourself before the kickoff call ends. Relay is chat infrastructure — not a platform rent-seeking on every seat.
Same headcount · different physics
Illustrative 500-person org. Slack bar uses common published Business+–style list pricing (~$12.50/user/mo). Relay bar: one Scale-tier server on your infrastructure — $48/mo illustrative list, whole workspace. Your Slack contract may differ; the shape of the chart won’t.
Illustrative 500-person org. Slack bar uses common published Business+–style list pricing (~$12.50/user/mo). Relay bar: same box fully managed — list $48/mo × 1.2 = $57.60/mo. Your Slack contract may differ; the shape of the chart won’t.
Bar = 100% — this is the burn you’re normalizing.
~0.77% of the Slack bar — true proportion ($48 ÷ $6,250). Bar is barely visible on purpose.
~0.92% of the Slack bar — coffee budget for one VP; chat for five hundred people.
Baseline Slack burn here: $6,250/mo (500 × $12.50 list). For Relay BYOI at $48/mo: monthly difference (Slack − Relay), yearly cash kept (×12), and percent vs that Slack line — plus the ratio.
Baseline Slack burn here: $6,250/mo (500 × $12.50 list). For Relay Cloud at $57.60/mo: monthly difference (Slack − Relay), yearly cash kept (×12), and percent vs that Slack line — plus the ratio.
$6,202/mo less than Slack (monthly difference)
$74,424/yr total not spent vs Slack, same headcount
99.23% lower than Slack · Relay is 0.77% of Slack’s tab · ~130.2× cheaper
$6,192.40/mo less than Slack (monthly difference)
$74,308.80/yr total not spent vs Slack, same headcount
99.08% lower than Slack · Relay is 0.92% of Slack’s tab · ~108.5× cheaper
Checks: $6,250 − $48 = $6,202; ×12 = $74,424; savings ÷ $6,250 = 99.23%. Ratio: $6,250 ÷ $48 ≈ 130.2×. Not financial advice — illustrative list math.
Checks: $6,250 − $57.60 = $6,192.40; ×12 = $74,308.80; savings ÷ $6,250 = 99.08%. Ratio: $6,250 ÷ $57.60 ≈ 108.5×. Not financial advice — illustrative list math.
That was the math
The reason cost looks like this is the same reason a single engineer wired our local LLM (Yee) into a Relay room in under a day. One server. One API. No marketplace toll. Read the integration story on the main page.