As some of you know, with the recent update to our new Teams and Permissions functionality, we had to do a few updates to our Free plan (namely, reducing the number of users and projects it allows you to have). This came as a bit of a surprise to a few of our users, one of which emailed us. The email we sent is below. We are posting it here (edited slightly for brevity) in hopes of hearing your feedback on this change.

I understand your frustration. Changing our Free plan (particularly for users who were already on it) has been a tough decision. Alas, also one we had to do. Maintaining an open service for many (many) thousands of free users is tough, and it takes a toll on everything we do. Support email is filled with requests from free users and more servers are necessary to run the application.

We love having the ability to give people our product for free - I’m sure we help many people who wouldn’t be able to pay for our paid plans in managing their personal projects. We do it with pride. We do, however, run it at a cost we pay for ourselves, and there’s only so much that our bank accounts can stretch to support free users.

In order to keep accommodating people on the free plan, we had to change its limits. There were people managing big money making companies (even household names) with our free account as its limits were quite permissive. That is an unsustainable situation for us. So what we did was level our free offering with the rest of the competition, and hope the product speaks for itself.

We feel like we have the number one product out there for online project management and collaboration. We also have the most competitive pricing. In short, what I’m saying is that we believe that if you go beyond 1 project and 2 users, you’re probably good for our startup plan, which we believe is pretty good.

I hope this helps explain our reasoning.

At the end of the day, we’re honored that people choose our product over the competition. It makes us proud, and makes our team come back to do this every day. We’re sad about having to limit our Free plan a bit, but our business so demands. Our goal is the same: to provide the best service out there, and to keep improving our product. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Hey everyone! In order to do the big migration to the new teams and permissions functionality, Goplan will be down for a few hours tomorrow in order to make sure everything migrates safely. We apologize for the inconvenience these hours of downtime may bring, but rest assured it is for a good cause. You’ll be able to follow our process through this blog and our twitter account.

As always, feel free to comment, tweet or email any questions you may have on the new functionality and the migration we’re doing. See you after the big move! We are super excited and hope you are too!

Upgrade status report:

Saturday, 4:40 pm GMT: Update time! In about 20 minutes, we’re bringing down the servers, backing up everything, upgrading functionality, and bringing it back.

Saturday, 5:42 pm GMT: We’re running the final batch of integrity checks to be sure that the migration runs smoothly. Once we’re done, we start the process.

Saturday, 6:11 pm GMT: Here we go. We just brought the servers down and are now backing up the database in order to start the migration.

Saturday, 6:27 pm GMT: Migration has just started. We expect the whole process to take just over one hour. We’ll report back once it’s over!

Saturday, 7:41 pm GMT: The migration has ended successfully, and we’re making sure everything’s good to go. We’ll keep you posted.

Saturday, 8:19 pm GMT: Looks like we’re almost good to go. We need a bit of time to double check and make a second backup post-migration.

Saturday, 8:56 pm GMT: We’re done! You should now be able to see the new teams/permissions functionality in your accounts. Let us know if you run into any issues!

We’re really excited about the changes we’ll be rolling out next week. We’ve been hard at work on some of these things for quite a while now, and can’t wait to finally have you try them out. Without further ado, here’s what’s coming:

Teams and permissions

The big thing we’re rolling out is our “teams and permissions” functionality. You’ll soon be able to divide your users into teams, which can then be assigned to projects with specific permissions (like the ability to read only, or read and make changes). Any user can be in several teams, which means possibilities are endless. You’ll be able to organize your users any way you like.

Permissions solve the problem many of you had of needing a way for your users and collaborators to be limited in the things they could do. So now there’s two main access types to a project, which will be configurable by company administrators through the Projects screen: read only access or read-write access. You can set permissions at the user level, or at the team level (so in a given project members of a “Design team” might read and write, whereas someone else - or a different team - might have read-access only).

In designing the new teams and permissions functionality we’ve made a few changes to users. Most of them are trivial, but there’s one thing you need to keep in mind: the notion of collaborators is going away. Collaborators were users that had access to a given project only. Since our permissions let you do the same thing more easily, everyone’s a user from now on. During the migration to the new functionality, we will automatically create teams for your collaborators, so that they still have access to the projects they were previously on.

Plan updates

With the redesign of our teams and permissions and the removal of collaborators, we had to do a few updates to our plans. Professional and Unlimited accounts aren’t affected, but our Free and Startup plans will suffer minor adjustments. Here’s a breakdown of the new limits for Free and Startup plans, that will be going live next week:

• Free plan: 2 users and 1 project, with 100mb of storage space.
• Startup ($10/mn): 10 users and 10 projects, with 10gb of storage space.

There is a small number of companies who will be negatively affected by this change, and we’re here to help out those that are. Companies on the Startup subscription that go beyond the new limits for their plan will be given an extra 6 months of today’s limits in order to adjust (usually by archiving old projects or removing old users). If you have any questions as to how the plan updates may affect you, feel free to contact our support team. Again, only a small minority of Startup companies will be affected - Professional and Unlimited plans remain unchanged.

iPhone app updates

Finally, a short update on our iPhone application. Those of you who’ve been checking out Get Satisfaction have probably already seen an early screenshot (head there if you haven’t). We’re hard at work at it and don’t expect it to take much longer. There will be a post dedicated exclusively to the iPhone application soon, namely to answer some of your questions on pricing (hint: free for users of our paid plans) and schedule. Keep an eye out on our blog for more screenshots and app-related posts very soon!