Slack charges £5.25–£8 per user per month depending on tier. A 10-person customer-facing team pays £52–£80/month, and that cost doesn't move if you send 10 messages or 10,000. You pay for the seat, not the volume. That math breaks down when your team lives in two systems: Slack for chatter, your CRM for customer records. A rep in Slack has to switch windows to see invoice history, support tickets, or deal stage. Context fragments. Handoffs pile up. And your Slack bill keeps climbing with every new hire, regardless of whether they actually need 16 threading features or a 10-year message archive. Here's what actually changes when you move team chat into your CRM instead. The per-user math that doesn't work for customer teams Slack's model assumes every team member needs every channel, every integration, every feature. Enterprise Grid scales that assumption up to unlimited users at £12.50 per person per month. For most teams, that's waste. A 10-person support or sales team probably needs: Internal hand-offs about a customer (5–10 messages per deal/ticket) Quick approvals on quotes or exceptions (2–3 async threads per day) Team standup or check-in (1–2 messages per person daily) Very rarely: 16-year message search across thousands of conversations You're paying for Slack's full feature set. You're using maybe 15% of it. The other 85%—persistent history, advanced search, API integrations to 2,000 apps—sits there unused. If Slack is your only shared communication tool, that makes sense. But if your team already lives in a CRM, the math changes. Where Slack fragments customer context (and why it matters) A rep works on a deal in Slack. They agree internally to offer a discount. Then they close Slack, open the CRM, update the deal stage, add a note, generate a quote. That's three systems for one customer moment. If the deal stalls, context is split between Slack history (who thought what) and CRM notes (what actually happened). When the rep leaves, Slack messages stay in Slack. CRM data stays in the CRM. A new rep has to reconstruct the customer relationship by reading Slack threads and CRM notes separately. A CRM with integrated team chat keeps context together. A rep talks to a colleague about a customer right next to that customer's record, deal history, and open tickets. No window switching. No context loss. When the rep exits the thread, the conversation is automatically tagged to that customer's record. That's not a luxury. It's the difference between a 3-day customer handoff and a 30-minute one. The 10-person team: £60/month Slack vs. Orin's bundled model A typical 10-person customer-facing team on Slack Pro (£6.50/user/month, or about £60/month after discounts): Pays £720 per year for team chat alone Still needs a separate CRM (Pipedrive at £170/month, HubSpot at £300+, Salesforce at £360+) Integrates Slack to the CRM via Zapier or native connector (adds £15–£50/month) Total: £900–£1,100 per year for communication + CRM basics Orin bundles team chat, CRM pipeline, contacts, and deals , and unified messaging across WhatsApp, SMS, and email . At that team size, you're paying one subscription instead of three. Context stays together. No Zapier bill for Slack-to-CRM sync. The cost difference isn't always dramatic (Orin scales with functionality, not head count), but for small, customer-focused teams, the context win outweighs the price win. Where Slack still wins: integration depth This is the real tradeoff, and it's not small. Slack has 2,000+ native integrations. If your team lives in Jira, GitHub, Datadog, Stripe, Intercom, and four other tools, Slack is a hub. You can surface alerts, deployments, payment events, and customer tickets directly into Slack channels. A single Slack workspace becomes your operational cockpit. Orin has native automations and Zapier integration , but not 2,000 purpose-built connectors. If you're a software team with a sprawling tool stack, Slack is still the better hub. Where Slack breaks is when your integrations become noise. If you have 30+ Slack channels with automated alerts, bot messages, and cross-tool noise, Slack stops being a communication tool and becomes a log aggregator. You mute channels, you miss alerts. Humans can't scale beyond about 5–8 active channels. Slack's advantage flips into a liability. When to consolidate, and when to keep Slack Keep Slack if: Your team uses 10+ external integrations (GitHub, Datadog, Jira, Stripe, etc.) and monitors them actively in Slack You need 16+ years of message archive and advanced search across thousands of conversations You have non-customer teams (engineering, marketing, operations) who need strong async coordination in a separate space Your team is 50+ people and Slack's per-user cost is baked into headcount assumptions Switch to Orin (or a CRM with team chat) if: Your team is customer-facing: sales, support, operations, account management Most communication is about a customer, deal, ticket, or order—things that belong in a C