A free BirthdayBot alternative for Slack (and where free ends)

If you are here, the number you probably met is fifteen: BirthdayBot's free plan is capped at 15 celebrations a year, and everything past the cap is a paid subscription with a 30-day trial — their own pricing page, checked August 26, 2026.

Here is our version of the same boundary, stated before anything else. AI HR Bot celebrates birthdays as part of an HR assistant, on every plan including the free one. The Free tier covers a team of up to 5 Employees; past that, the Team tier is $4 per employee per month, a dollar less billed annually. That is the whole catch, and it is the first thing on this page rather than the last.

This is what the birthdays themselves look like — the Reminder ahead, then the Wish on the day:

What actually gets sent

Up to seven days ahead, the bot sends a Reminder as a direct message — to the workspace's HR Heads and to each person's own Lead, batched into one message rather than one per name. Nobody is reminded about their own birthday.

On the day, one post lands in the Celebrations Channel — never before nine in the morning, in the workspace's own timezone. Two people who share the date share one combined Wish, so nobody's post competes with their deskmate's.

And a Wish that missed its day is not sent the day after. A belated wish is worse than silence, so the window is the day itself or not at all.

What it refuses to know

The bot stores a birthday as a month and a day — never a year. The Slack profile field it reads is free text and may carry one; the year is stripped on arrival, before it touches the database. Nothing in the system can answer how old somebody is, because the figure is not there to look up.

Celebrating is also each person's own call. The bot asks once, and declining is a first-class answer, not a gap to chase — someone who opts out gets no Wish and no Reminder sent about them, to anyone, and can change their mind in conversation whenever they like.

Where the two products part ways

BirthdayBot sells celebration workflows — its site lists work anniversaries, gift cards, rewards and content packs, read the same day as the pricing above. We do none of that. Birthdays here are two messages and a GIF, and they stop there.

What surrounds them instead is an HR assistant. The same bot files a Leave Request typed in plain language, runs the Approval Chain, and answers policy questions from your own Knowledge Base. Birthdays are not a separate product with its own meter; they are part of the assistant, on every plan.

If birthdays are all you want

Connecting an HR assistant is a bigger decision than installing a birthday bot. This one will hold hire dates and Leave Balances, and every Slack permission it asks for is named, scope by scope, on the security page — compare that list against the consent screen when you install. If birthdays are genuinely all you want from a bot, we are a bigger tool than you need, and BirthdayBot's 30-day trial exists for exactly that question.

The fit here is a small team that wants birthdays in Slack today and expects the HR chores to arrive tomorrow — the same bot that posts the Wish files the Friday-off Request. For up to 5 Employees, that costs nothing. The exact messages are drawn on the birthdays page, and the install guide covers the setup.