Price changes, they are a-comin’

By Pete Curley | 1 year ago | 30 Comments

UPDATE: The new pricing is now live! Let us know if you have any issues signing up under the new system or upgrading from an older plan.

Why are you changing your prices?

When we first launched HipChat, we based our pricing model on what similar companies in the space were doing (it seemed like a good place to start). The general trend seemed to be that you have several tiered plans based on a number of factors like number of users, storage, and miscellaneous features.

After living with the current system for the past year we’ve found that it fell short in a few areas:

Small teams were paying for the Plus plan to get additional chat history, even though they had nowhere near the 30 user limit. That’s lame.
We have a lot of groups with hundreds of members now. Our current system doesn’t work well at that scale, which means we actively spend a lot of time doing custom billing. We’d rather be building features.
It just feels complicated. You have to compare number of users, features, file storage and all this other stuff just to get your team on board. Our actual product is far simpler than our pricing.

So we’re switching things up. Not only is our new system a lot simpler, we believe it’s more fair to smaller teams, good for our business, and better for our product.

What are the changes?

We’re scrapping the complicated plans and feature-limiting and switching to:

$2 per user, per month.

Every user will get…everything.

Unlimited storage
Unlimited chat history
Unlimited SMS messages

We’ve also added support for yearly billing.

When will this be happening?

November 25th, 2011 (two weeks from today)

Do I need to do anything?

If you’re already a paying customer: Nope, you’re good. You have the choice of upgrading to the new pricing model or staying on your current plan. If the new pricing is cheaper for you (which it probably will be if you’re a smaller team), then go ahead and upgrade to the new pricing when we roll it out on November 25th. If you prefer to stay on your existing plan, you can do that as well.

If you’re on our free plan: The good news is that the free plan now includes unlimited storage, chat history, and SMS. However, we’re changing how we count users. It used to be that you could have many users in your group but only four could be signed in at a time. In the new system, you can only have four total users in the system.

If you’re currently on your 30-day trial: You should check and see if our existing plans are cheaper for your team than $2/user/month. If they are, upgrade before November 25th you’ll be locked in at that price. If you don’t upgrade before then, you’ll pay $2/user/month.

If you have any questions or feedback feel free to contact us.

HipChat is group chat and IM built for teams. Learn more

http://ivanbrezakbrkan.com Ivan Brezak Brkan

Awesome
http://ivanbrezakbrkan.com Ivan Brezak Brkan

Awesome This change will save us some money…
http://www.zippykid.com Heidi

Wow! That’s so cool. As Ivan said, we’ll save money too!!! woot!
http://twitter.com/ryanisinallofus Ryan Ray

Nice change. Good work.
Roger

Can we just deduct the carpet cleaning fees from the new pricing? j/k

Hope you guys are rockin’!

You may now delete this message.
Roger

Can we just deduct the carpet cleaning fees from the new pricing? j/k

Hope you guys are rockin’!

You may now delete this message.
http://chuckreynolds.us Chuck Reynolds

*CLAPS* love it. We’ll move to the $2/user the minute we can.

Also… for that ‘working on features’ thing… Native Mac app… and allow phone & desktop to be signed in at the same time

Cheers guys!
Steve Jernigan

Humm, how long can we lock in the current pricing scheme for?
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Until November 25th.
Steve Jernigan

Sorry, I meant if I locked them in, how long will those prices be good for. This will be significantly more for my group but we haven’t committed yet.
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Ah gotcha. We don’t currently have a plan to end those prices, but it’s probably not forever.
Todd Sasser

I am not sure how this would be an advantage to “a smaller team”. We signed up for a Plus plan that is $24 for 30 members… For that many people it would now be $60? That is more than double. In fact, for all of the listed plans, you do get more storage or “features”, but the price per person is at least double… I think we will be staying on the Plus plan for as long as we can.
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Hey Todd, I guess we could have been more clear. We considered small teams to be 10 people and under.
http://www.s-consult.com Wayne Schulz

This is essentially a change from concurrent user pricing to named user pricing.
lanoitarus

How will this affect the other two features of the higher-tier plans: open rooms and private rooms?
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Everything will be included. Private rooms, open rooms, and Guest access
Rushi Vishavadia

Is this $2 per *active* user per month, or $2 per user that’s signed up on your account?
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Per user that’s signed up.
Stevn Bartley

I am trying to understand where anyone would save money under the new pricing. It would appear to me that currently a 4 person group would be on the free account. 4-12 users would be on the Basic account at $9 per month. Any account of 5 or more users moving to the $2 per user plan is an increase in cost. A 5 user plan would be $10 per month, a $1 increase over the Basic plan.

A 10 user plan would go to $20 per month, an $11 dollar per month increase. I am not seeing where “smaller teams” get any savings either and in our case of a 30 person team, the increase is from $24 per month to $60 per month. That is 2.5 times more than the current plan or an increase of 150% over what was being charged for no apparent benefit in product or service for what our business needs were with the tool.
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

As I mentioned in the blog post, many small teams (~5 people) are currently paying for Plus so they can have all the features: private rooms, guest access, and full chat history. On the existing system they pay $24/month. On the new system, they’ll pay $10/month.

If the old system works better for your specific company, then please stay on it. We’re trying not to force anyone to do something they don’t want to. We’re just trying fixing issues with our current billing system.
Ben Walton

How does the pricing work for Guest Access?
http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

Guest Access will be enabled for all new paying customers and guest accounts won’t count towards the $2/user/mo cost.
Stevn Bartley

OK. That clarifies where there might be savings for small teams. I guess the larger concern for us is that in other comments posted, you have replied that “We don’t currently have a plan to end those prices, but it’s probably not forever.”. This would indicate that at some point (near/far??) the pricing change will be enforced on existing accounts and would raise our price by 150%. It is the unknown of when/if this is going to be forced on us and the amount of the increase that makes us question continued use of the product.
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

It’s definitely far, you don’t have anything to worry about. We’re trying to go above and beyond with our existing customers to make sure they’re always taken care of.
http://www.twago.com Chris Ked

You put me in a though situation. Not sure if I should upgrade today or wait for the new prices =)
http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

If you sign up for one of the current plans today you’ll be able to upgrade to the new style at any time. But once the new plans go live tomorrow you won’t be able to sign up for the old style of plans anymore. Hope that helps.
Joshua

This presents a pretty big issue for us. We give out a lot of accounts to our internal company members who aren’t active members of the team, mostly so they have view access to the chats (they do participate, but rarely). Now, we’ll be paying around twice as much to do this, or removing those users.

Guest accounts might be an option, but don’t really work all that well (since you have to manually give guests access to each room, you can’t 1-1 chat with guests, and other issues).

I really like HC, but this makes me wonder if/how it’ll work for us…
http://twitter.com/petecurley Peter Curley

Guest access has a pretty specific use case. It wasn’t designed as a way to get around paying for users. Shoot me an email at pete@hipchat.com so we can talk in more detail. Thanks!
Geekrebel

We hated the old pricing model, especially after some features (long term chat logs, private chats) were suddenly removed from the plan we were on. These were deal breakers and we stopped using Hipchat as a result. Will look at it again, but hope that the price mix & match was a result of a better, more customer centric philopophy.
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First of all, Hip Chat is awesome! Thanks for it…And I’m absolutely OK with the new pricing, actually. I consider it to be reasonable and not at all costly;))