The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is scrambling to put in place a new collaboration platform for its vast community after Salesforce unexpectedly pulled the plug on its free enterprise Slack account.

The CNCF flagged “Slack workspace changes coming on Friday, June 20” earlier this week, explaining “The CNCF Slack workspace will be converted from an enterprise plan to a free plan on Friday, June 20, 2025.” 

As CNCF’s Daniel Krook explained, the “free enterprise account” had been in place for ten years, courtesy of Slack “and Salesforce who acquired them.”

Salesforce itself joined the organization in 2017.

But, he continued, “They have recently informed us that they will no longer be able to continue to support us as they originally did.”

With barely five working days notice, it seems the move – arriving alongside a raft of other platform changes including price hikes and the addition of AI to many of its products – was unexpected. 

The CNCF may move to a new platform later in the year, with Discord the hot favorite.

In the meantime, the organization and its community are grappling with “the feature limitations of the free Slack plan.”

The key ones are “retaining only 90 days of message history and having to turn off some apps and workflows that we are currently using.”

The Kubernetes Contributors Community said that “Our Slack history is backed up to offline archives, which, while presently not searchable, do include the entire time Kubernetes has been on Slack.

It advised contributors about what to do with their saved files and private channels – essentially back them up now. And it confirmed that user groups will “go away.”

It also gave some further background on the move, saying “The scale of the Kubernetes community has put strains on Slack’s infrastructure. This week, they let the CNCF Projects staff know that they cannot continue to host us the same way.”

The move is not the only disruption for the CNCF community this month. Earlier this month it announced the “sunset” of the CNCF Community Cluster at the end of 2025. “As Equinix Metal sunsets its offering, support for community initiatives like ours is also being phased out,” it explained.

The organization said, “We look back with immense gratitude and look ahead with optimism for the future of cloud native open source infrastructure using alternatives such as those from our partner Oracle and others.”

Community members looking for compute power can “request services through the CNCF ServiceDesk.”

DevClass contacted Salesforce for comment on the move. We haven’t heard back.