$10M
Google paid $10 million for Spirit Airlines' data: 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages and 176,000 employee records, outbidding Mercor.
(MIT Technology Review, checked 18 Oct 2026)
Record type
The market for workplace chat records
Workplace chat is the record type programmes name most often: Grepped, Mercor, Troveo, Polyshares, Handshake AI, Turing and SimpleClosure all list Slack or Teams. No one prices it per message. The clearest signal is Spirit Airlines: Google paid $10 million for a set including 500 million Teams messages.
Page updated 19 Oct 2026. Figures checked 18 Oct 2026 at their sources.
Tools that hold it
Slack
Microsoft Teams- Google Chat
Programmes
Who says they accept it
Programme
What it says
Source
What it saysMessages from Slack and Microsoft Teams, connected read-only.
(Grepped, checked 18 Oct 2026)
What it saysSlack, Teams, Google Chat and Zoom among 30+ systems.
(Troveo, checked 18 Oct 2026)
What it saysSlack listed first among the operational records it licenses.
(Polyshares, checked 18 Oct 2026)
What it saysSlack named among the sources for business records.
(Handshake AI, checked 18 Oct 2026)
What it saysCommunication threads and channels, as part of the work record.
(Turing, checked 18 Oct 2026)
What it saysCommunications from Slack inside WorkspaceData.
(SimpleClosure, checked 18 Oct 2026)
Price signals
What the record has fetched, where anyone says
~$15K
Workspace data pending sale for one founder through SimpleClosure, alongside about $25,000 for his codebase.
(MIT Technology Review, checked 18 Oct 2026)
$0.001
Per word: the general market rate for text that Defined.ai's CEO gave Reuters in April 2024. It describes generic text, not company chat.
(Reuters via China Daily HK, checked 18 Oct 2026)
Full tables: AI training data prices and the disclosed deals database.
What buyers say they do with it
- Ooak Data anonymises tool data from Gmail, Slack, Notion and Jira into a "digital twin" and turns it into RL environments. (Y Combinator, checked 18 Oct 2026)
- Surge AI uses startup archives to build reinforcement-learning gyms for training AI agents. (MIT Technology Review, checked 18 Oct 2026)
- Turing describes what it wants as the record of how the work actually got done, starting with threads and channels. (Turing, checked 18 Oct 2026)
Notes for reading the market
Chat is priced as part of a company's whole record, not on its own. Every published range above is per company.
Plan level decides what an export can contain: on Slack, private channels and direct messages need a higher plan, and a workspace that drops to the free plan starts losing year-old messages. See the retention reference.
Keep reading
Related pages
Published payout ranges by headcountFilter by record type and size.Read SaaS retention after cancellationDays left per tool, with sources.Read The market for email archivesEmail archivesRead The market for support ticket recordsSupport ticketsRead The market for source code repositoriesSource codeRead
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
01Which programmes accept Slack or Teams history?
Grepped, Mercor, Troveo, Polyshares, Handshake AI, Turing, SimpleClosure and Replay all name chat or decision threads among what they take, each with its own terms.
02Is there a price per Slack message?
No programme publishes one. Chat is priced as part of a company's record, and published ranges are per company. The only per-unit text figure on record is $0.001 per word for generic text.
03What did Google pay for Spirit Airlines' data?
$10 million, for a set including 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages and 176,000 employee records, according to MIT Technology Review.
04Why do AI buyers want workplace chat?
Buyers such as Ooak Data, Surge AI and micro1 describe turning real work records into reinforcement-learning environments where agents practise tasks.
05Does Slack's free plan affect what can be licensed?
Yes. Once a paid workspace drops to Free, only the last 90 days are visible and messages older than a year are deleted on a rolling basis, so older history is gone.
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