Slack will give a free upgrade to the paid version to teams helping solve the coronavirus crisis

• Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said the company is now offering "free upgrades to paid plans" for teams working on coronavirus research, response, or mitigation.
• "We've done hundreds of upgrades and consultations already and have an incredibly helpful, speedy and energized team standing by. We're grateful to be able to help where we can," Butterfield tweeted on Monday.
• Last week during the company's earnings call with analysts, Slack said it has been seeing a signficant spike in new users for its free product, as more people work from home to mitigate the spread of coronavirus.
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Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said the workplace chat company is now offering "free upgrades to paid plans" for teams working on coronavirus pandemic research, response, or mitigation.

That means any team working on a collaborative research, response, or mitigation to the coronavirus will get access to a paid plan for free. Slack has a free version of its product that anyone can download and start using, and then offers different levels of paid plans with more features.

Interested teams can email a special address, covid@slack.com, to get set up. Butterfield said teams can also email to set up a consultation on how best to get started with remote collaboration.

"We've done hundreds of upgrades and consultations already and have an incredibly helpful, speedy and energized team standing by. We're grateful to be able to help where we can," he tweeted on Monday.

Butterfield's comments come as more companies ask employees to work from home to try and mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and as a result cloud software tools like Slack and videoconferencing tool Zoom are seeing a lot more interest and usage. On Monday, Zoom was the top free app on Apple's App Store.

Last week during the company's earnings call with analysts, Slack said it has been seeing a signficant spike in new users for its free product amid the coronavirus outbreak. However, they said its too early to tell if that will impact business going forward.

In general, analysts are expecting cloud software companies like Slack, Zoom and Dropbox to do well where many other industries might not, because people will be relying more on tools to stay connected and productive while working from home.

Other companies are also offering resources to help those on the front lines of fighing the coronavirus. Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet - Google's parent company - is building a website designed to help people seeking testing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Salesforce is donating $1.5 million to the City of San Francisco to support its response to the coronavirus crisis and through its Health Cloud product, it will provide free access to its technology for emergency response teams, call centers, and care management teams for health systems affected by coronavirus.

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