• Released apps for iPhone/iPad and Android
• Opened up XMPP access and had many users create bots
• Shocked Bay Area residents with our billboard
• Simplified our pricing model
• Added support for signing in from multiple locations
• Made over 100 improvements and fixes to our desktop app
• Launched a referral program and created a ton of custom emoticons
• Added dozens of integrations

We’ve also made major improvements to the reliability and speed of our service and have over 10 times more people chatting every day than we did a year ago. Almost every week in the past year was our biggest ever (apparently everyone goes on vacation during the last week of August). Here’s to another exciting year! We’re grateful for your support and are excited to share the wonderful things we have on our roadmap with you.

Like most HipChat features you’ll find the experience better than on other IM networks. Messages you send and receive will show up everywhere else you’re signed in* and we’ll even restore your proper status message and idle time when you sign out of your most recently used location. You can even see a list of all your sessions in your account settings on the site:

As always, let us know if you run into any trouble or have suggestions for things we can improve. Enjoy!

* Unfortunately the experience will be less awesome for XMPP users since other clients don’t always support this.

• New feature: Support for room archiving
• New feature: Support for room renaming
• Improvement: Shift+enter can now be used to add a newline
• Bug fix: Using the s/// notation for typo replacement no longer replaces within the message itself
• Improvement: The font size of the text in the input area now matches the chat area
• Improvement: Idle time now displays in 1-to-1 chats
• Bug fix: Fixed an issue where text associated with file uploads would sometimes disappear
• Bug fix: Popup notifications for system messages with HTML should now display correctly
• Bug fix: Fixed an issue clicking the scrollbar in the autocomplete popup

Note: If you have not installed the the latest desktop app update already (instructions here) you will be required to do so before signing in again after the maintenance is finished.

Have a fun and safe New Year’s weekend!

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’re also keeping our free plan around (for 4 people) and 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.

When: Wednesday, November 16, 6-8pm
Where: Thirsty Bear Brewing Company @ 661 Howard St, SF, CA 94105
What: The HipChat team, happy users, and (beer)

• Improved detection of connectivity (this should help avoid the “forever loading” chats that many people reported)
• Fixed a crashing issue when coming from a notification
• Various fixes to avoid crashes when opening the app and signing in
• Messages will now display instantly instead of waiting for a server response. Unconfirmed messages will be indicated by a warning symbol.

The update is live on the Android Market now: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.hipchat&hl=en – try it out and let us know what you think. We still have lots of improvements we want to make and user feedback helps us figure out what is most important.

Join us for the first ever HipChat Drinkup in SF! We’re heading to Pete’s Tavern in SOMA this Thursday. Your first beer is on us… and we may have a few coveted HipChat tshirts too!

When: This Thursday, September 22, 8pm
Where: Pete’s Tavern 128 King St, SF, CA 94107
What: The HipChat team, other happy users, and (beer)

• New feature: Sent message history is now saved and may be accessed by pressing ctrl (or cmd)+up/down in the input box
• New feature: The client will now show a preview for image files before they are uploaded (including images pasted from the clipboard)
• New feature: Added a shortcut to set status via right-clicking on the dock or system tray icon
• Improvement (User request): Typing notifications for private chats have received a style makeover and should be less obtrusive now
• Improvement (User request): The message input area will now grow (to a certain extent) with the size of the text entered
• Improvement: All sent messages will now display immediately upon sending instead of waiting for server confirmation. Added a style to indicate if a message hasn’t been confirmed.
• Improvement: Link detection (youtube/twitter/etc) will now work in private chats
• Improvement: The file upload progress display has moved to a less modal format
• Improvement: Autocomplete will now be biased towards choosing users currently in the room above users not in the room
• Improvement (User request): Shortened welcome message significantly
• Improvement (User request): Added shortcuts for ctrl-home/end (beginning/end of chat history)
• Improvement: @-mentions will now trigger a persistent notification similar to private messages
• Improvement: Pressing ESC will now cancel the login process
• Improvement: Show Android status for users logged in via the android app
• Improvement: Added visual notification when a video chat call is incoming
• Improvement: Enabled text control shortcuts in fields other than primary chat message input
• Improvement: Messages with newline characters at the beginning or end should now be trimmed properly
• Improvement: Various errors should now give more appropriate messaging as to what the specific error is
• Improvement: Fixed tab order for buttons and inputs
• Improvement (User request): Mentioning .sh or .py files in your messages should no longer cause them to show up as links
• Improvement: Cleaned up reconnection logic and messaging
• Improvement: The autocomplete mention popup should no longer show when typing an email
• Bug fix: Clicking on the dock icon should no longer cause the application to revert away from maximized state
• Bug fix: Users should no longer see issues around auth tokens when uploading files
• Bug fix: Receiving an @-mention while in DND status will now trigger a notification
• Bug fix: Trailing slashes are now correctly linkified
• Bug fix: Fixed the check for the 24-hour time display preference
• Bug fix: Fixed an issue where idle users would show as active in a newly-created private room
• Bug fix: Fixed display of mentions separated by a slash
• Bug fix: Fixed an issue with autocomplete when it contained only two items
• Bug fix: File names with various special characters should now be handled correctly

Try it out and let us know if you encounter any problems. If you’re not sure how to update your client, check out https://www.hipchat.com/help/page/how-to-update-the-hipchat-desktop-client.

Enjoy!