More than a million people use Slack every day now. You do, probably. Hard to imagine you reading a story about enterprise software if it wasn’t a part of your working life. Then again, Slack has always been a little weird like that. A year and a half ago, no one had ever heard of it. A few days later, everyone you knew was using it.

Okay, not everyone. But all the startups had taken their workplace chatter there, and then the media did, too. And once something is being used by all of the startups and all of the media, it begins to feel inevitable and then necessary. (This is the entire story of Twitter.)

300,000 of Slack's 1.1 million users use the paid version

Of Slack’s 1.1 million users, 300,000 use the paid version. Employers will pay between $6.67 and $48 a month per user for the hottest Slack features, such as a searchable archive with unlimited messages ($6.67 a month, if billed annually); an archive of everything you have ever typed, for compliance purposes ($12.50 a month, billed annually) and "a configurable email ingestion service," $48, which sounds disgusting.

Slack projects its revenues around $25 million this year. It has raised $340 million, and is valued at $2.8 billion. At least, that’s how much it was worth in April. Who knows what it would be valued at today. Pick any number you like — $8 billion, say. Slack will probably be worth that at some point. November, maybe?

Slack will generate revenues of $25 million this year

Some people use Slack for free. There is a writers’ Slack, and an LGBTQ Slack, and a Slack for former Twitter employees, who hang out in Slack all day long and LOL at the day’s Twitter news. There is ChitCats, "a place to discover and join private Slack groups," where people vote on Slacks, Reddit-style.

This week a group named Free Code Camp sent me an email with the promising subject line "Slack is lying to its users." The founder of Free Code Camp, Quincy Larson, complained that while Slack promises it is free to an unlimited number of users, this week code campers reached the previously undocumented free Slack limit of 8,462 people. A spokeswoman for Slack said this: "Slack plainly says about the free plan, ‘We offer a free plan for small teams, casual users, and anyone who wants to evaluate Slack.’ Based on that, it’s difficult to infer Slack would be an appropriate tool for use by a 10,000-person community."

Slack’s pricing page really does say there are "no limits on time or users," though, so at some point Slack will have to change the language there. It won’t be that big of a deal.

Free up to 8,462 users

Slack is successful because it integrates with other things — about 100 other things right now. Workplace chat apps are a dime a dozen, so as best as anyone can tell, it’s these integrations that made Slack a big deal. For example, you can set up a chat room that tells you every time people mention your #brand on Twitter. (Your brand sucks!) Or you can set up a room that imports every picture that Beyoncé posts to Instagram. Or you can have Github do things in your Slack, if you are a code person. Slack users have set up 900,000 of these integrations so far, and they send 30 million messages a week.

Slack is not perfect. Months ago, its founder, Stewart Butterfield, told me you would soon be able to leave emoji comments on Slack messages. For example, if someone said something poopy, you could comment with a poop emoji, and so could your co-workers, and in time you would return to view the poopy message, and it would have eight poops next to it. This hasn’t shipped yet, and I for one would like to know what’s going on there.

Slack also leads employees to near-constant goofing around, whether by playing games of Jeopardy! or using Giphy to punctuate every sentence with random animations. John Herrman memorably called this "mainstream work larping." Certainly you will observe people at your company who never have time for you but are incredibly active on Slack, hunting through every chat room in search of someone to banter with for a few more moments before returning to their TPS reports.

A persistent low-level work anxiety that will haunt you until the end of time

But you will also observe people who barely pay attention to Slack at all, and you will resent them for it, and at some point someone you work with who is terrible at Slack will be fired for not being "a culture fit," and you’ll understand that these two things are likely related. How much should you participate in Slack? What is the right amount of GIFs? These will add to the persistent, low-level work anxieties that you will carry around for the rest of your days.

On the other hand, look at Google Docs. Until very recently — yesterday, maybe? — opening a Google Doc through Slack took three clicks. The first click opened a useless sidebar. The second click opened a browser tab that contained a link to the Google Doc in a format that looked exactly like the tab in the useless sidebar. Then you clicked that link and finally your Google Doc opened. I asked Slack to fix this on Twitter last week, and a couple people chimed in, and this morning when I went to open a Google Doc through Slack, it opened with a single click.

Anyway, 1.1 million people, $25 million, $2.8 billion. The numbers look big today. They won’t tomorrow.