How to Set Up Goodbye / Leave Messages in Discord for Free

To set up a goodbye message when a member leaves Discord, add a free bot like PeakBot, pick a staff or general channel for departure notices, and turn on its leave-message setting with a short text or embed. Discord has no built-in leave message, so a bot is required — and you do not need a paid plan to do it.

Welcome messages get all the attention, but the moment a member leaves is just as useful to track. A clean goodbye message tells your moderators who left, keeps your member count honest, and gives smaller communities a quiet sense of who's coming and going. This guide walks through doing it for free, with real Discord mechanics and no upsell traps.

Why goodbye messages matter (and why they're often paywalled)

A leave message does three practical things. It gives moderators a passive log of departures without digging through the audit log. It surfaces patterns — if five people leave right after a rules change or a heated thread, you'll notice. And in a tight-knit server, a low-key "someone left" note keeps the community grounded in reality instead of staring at a member count that only ever ticks up in welcome spam.

The catch is that several popular bots lock leave messages, or the good parts of them, behind premium. MEE6 in particular gates a lot of its welcome and farewell customization behind its premium tier at $11.95/month. You can do goodbye messages without paying — Discord just doesn't ship the feature itself, so you need a bot, and the bot you pick decides whether it costs anything.

What you can and can't do natively in Discord

Out of the box, Discord gives you system messages in your server settings. Under Server Settings → Overview → System Messages Channel, you can toggle "Send a random welcome message when someone joins this server." That's the join side.

There is no native equivalent for leaves. Discord does not post anything when a member departs, and there's no setting anywhere to enable it. The closest native signal is the audit log, which records kicks and bans but not voluntary leaves at all. So if you want a message the moment someone walks out the door — voluntary or not — you need a bot listening for Discord's guildMemberRemove event. Every method below relies on that.

Step 1: Add a free bot that supports leave messages

You need a bot with a farewell or leave-message feature that isn't paywalled. PeakBot handles welcome and goodbye messages as part of its free tier, alongside more than 30 other free features with no trial period and no time limit.

To add it, head to peakbot.pro, click invite, choose your server, and approve the permissions. The bot needs View Channel and Send Messages in whatever channel you'll use for goodbyes, plus the Server Members Intent (which any leave-message bot requires to see members come and go — reputable bots request this automatically during setup).

If you're choosing between options here, our roundup of the best Discord welcome bots for 2026 compares how each one handles join and leave flows, and which ones make you pay for it.

Step 2: Choose a channel for leave messages

Where the message lands matters more than people expect. Three common choices:

• A staff-only channel (e.g. #mod-log or #member-flow). Best for most servers. Departures are operational information, not something the whole community needs in their face. Members leaving is normal; broadcasting it to everyone can make a server feel like it's bleeding people even when it isn't.
• A general or lobby channel. Fine for small, personal communities where everyone knows everyone and a quiet "so-and-so left" feels natural rather than dramatic.
• A dedicated #comings-and-goings channel. A tidy middle ground — pairs join and leave notices in one low-traffic feed that the curious can mute or follow.

For most servers, keep leave messages out of high-traffic public channels. A goodbye notice in #general during an active conversation reads as noise at best and as a guilt trip at worst.

Step 3: Turn on the free goodbye message

In PeakBot's dashboard, open the welcome/goodbye section, enable Leave messages, and select the channel you chose in Step 2. Then write the message. A plain, useful default looks like:

{user} left the server. We're now at {membercount} members.

If you'd rather not reveal a username on departure — some communities prefer not to spotlight people who leave — you can drop {user} and keep it neutral:

A member just left. Member count: {membercount}.

You can deliver leave notices as plain text or as an embed. Plain text reads cleaner in a staff channel; an embed looks more deliberate in a public comings-and-goings feed. Either is free.

If you haven't set up the join side yet, the companion walkthrough on how to set up a Discord welcome message covers embeds, auto-role, and DM greetings using the same dashboard.

Step 4: Add member-count and time-in-server variables

Variables are what make a leave message worth reading instead of generic. The most useful ones for departures:

• {user} — the leaving member's name (or username, depending on the bot's formatting).
• {membercount} — your live total after they left. Pairing this with leaves gives you an honest running headcount instead of a number that only grows.
• {server} — your server name, handy if the same template is reused.

Some bots also expose a time-in-server or join-date value, which is genuinely interesting on the leave event — it tells you whether people are churning in the first hour (a sign your onboarding or rules gate is too aggressive) or leaving after months (natural attrition). If your bot supports it, a template like:

{user} left after being here {timeinserver}. Now at {membercount} members.

turns your goodbye channel into a lightweight retention signal. Check your bot's variable reference for the exact token, since the naming differs between bots. Always send a test by leaving with an alt account or asking a moderator to part and rejoin — variables that look right in the editor occasionally render empty if an intent is missing.

Step 5: Keep the tone low-key, not corny

This is where most leave messages go wrong. Resist the urge to write "Sorry to see you go, come back soon!" with three waving-hand emojis. It reads as automated and slightly desperate, and the person it's "addressed" to has already left and will never see it. The audience for a leave message is the people who stayed — usually your staff.

Write for them. Short, factual, and neutral wins:

• Good: {user} left. {membercount} members.
• Avoid: Aww, {user} has left us! We'll miss you so much! plus a row of waving-hand emojis.

The understated version respects everyone's time and ages well. This is the same principle behind a good join message — keep the copy minimal and human rather than hype-filled.

Step 6: Run welcome and goodbye flows together in one setup

There's no reason to wire these up with two different bots. Configuring join and leave in the same place keeps your variables consistent, your channels organized, and your maintenance to one dashboard. In PeakBot, welcome messages (embeds, DM greeting, and auto-role) and leave messages live in the same welcome and onboarding feature, so you set both once.

A common clean pairing:

• Welcome → public #welcome channel, friendly embed, auto-assign a @Member role.
• Goodbye → quiet #mod-log channel, plain text with {membercount}.

If you're building out onboarding more fully — verification, roles, the first-impression flow — the Discord welcome bot setup guide goes deeper on the join side, and you can mirror the leave side from this post. And because the same bot also handles XP, the walkthrough on setting up level role rewards without MEE6 premium shows how the free tier covers leveling too, so you're not stacking multiple paid bots.

Troubleshooting: messages not firing

If your goodbye message never appears, work through these in order:

1. Server Members Intent is off. This is the most common cause. The bot needs the Server Members privileged intent enabled in its developer settings (or, with a hosted bot like PeakBot, this is handled for you on invite). Without it, the bot literally cannot see members leave.
2. Wrong or missing channel permissions. The bot needs View Channel and Send Messages in the leave channel specifically. Channel-level permission overrides quietly beat server-level roles, so check the channel's permissions tab, not just the bot's role.
3. The feature is enabled but no channel is selected. Some dashboards let you toggle leave messages on without picking a destination. Confirm a channel is set.
4. You tested with the wrong account. A bot can't leave-message itself, and many won't fire for other bots. Test with a real second human account or alt.
5. The member was kicked vs. left. Most bots treat kicks, bans, and voluntary leaves the same (all fire guildMemberRemove), but a few separate them. If kicks fire but quits don't, check whether your bot has split settings.
6. Rate limits or channel slowmode. A channel with aggressive slowmode can swallow rapid bot posts. Use a normal channel for leave logs.

If you've checked all six and it still won't fire, the PeakBot support server can sort it out quickly.

Frequently asked questions

Does Discord have a built-in goodbye message when someone leaves?

No. Discord only offers native join (welcome) system messages, and there is no native leave message of any kind. To post anything when a member departs, you need a bot listening for the member-remove event.

Can I set up Discord leave messages for free?

Yes. The feature isn't built into Discord, but free bots can do it. PeakBot includes both welcome and goodbye messages in its free tier with no trial period, so you don't need a paid plan to log departures.

Will the person who left actually see the goodbye message?

No. Once someone leaves your server, they can no longer see its channels, so a leave message posted in-server is only visible to remaining members. Write it for your staff, not for the person who left.

Should goodbye messages go in a public channel?

For most servers, no. Departures are operational information, so a staff or mod-log channel is usually better. Small, personal communities can use a general channel, but keep leave notices out of busy public channels where they read as noise.

What's the difference between a kick, ban, and leave for these messages?

Discord fires the same member-remove event for voluntary leaves, kicks, and bans, so most bots post a goodbye for all three by default. If you want to distinguish them, check whether your bot offers separate settings or pulls from the audit log to label the reason.

Do I need a different bot for welcome and goodbye messages?

No, and you shouldn't use two. A single bot like PeakBot handles both join and leave flows from one dashboard, which keeps your channels and variables consistent and your setup easy to maintain.