Billing Sero Sed Serio (Late, but in earnest)

Welcome to the Webby Chat Blog! We had a forum and hoped that you all would join in, but we now think that we have spoiled you with Webby Chat's real time communication. However, we do have frequent announcements and needed a place to make them, so now we blog. So we pledge to keep you up to date.

So here's the latest developments:

This week we worked hard to build a billing system that was reasonable and fair. We considered billing per visitor, by room size, and by comparison to other services. We put a lot of time, energy, money, and research into making Webby Chat as slick as it is, but we always put off the billing question for later. Well...its later and now that we are beginning to provide some serious value for our customers, we want to be fair to ourselves and supportive spouses too.

After much anguish on our parts, we settled on providing tiered plans that are optimized for different types of users and provide a lot more value than do our competitors.

• Free is great. Lots of people have personal sites with limited traffic or just want to try it out
  
• Basic is best for new or lower traffic websites where control is important
  
• Standard is sweet for established blogs or sites that need greater flexibility
• Big is bigger.
  

All of those plans are great if you have a steady predictable stream of traffic, but then Old Navy had to go and hide a bunch of coupons. Traffic and users went waaay up on multiple sites. This is great except we have have to make sure we are prepared to keep everything running in tip top shape and we have to be ready to support the added users.

We didn't want to make the plans any more complicated or more expensive, so in order for us to keep up with events like this we implemented a 24 hour capacity upgrades. The concept is that most of the time one of the above plans is completely appropriate, but sometimes sites need more. So $5 gets 100 more visitors for 24 hours. If you need 200 visitors, buy 2. This is in addition to your current plan's capacity and is really a pretty good deal considering your site now has 200+ visitors.

Also, we added several new commands this week...which was not easy, but we hope it makes you smile. "/notify" makes crickeys smile. I like it when people whistle at me (type anybody's name and they hear a whistle:-) For all commands click the question mark at the bottom right of the chat history window.

Anyway, thank you very much for helping to justify our hard work. Please keep the feedback coming.

Sincerely,

Samwel

PS...I promise that the more you comment on the blog posts, the more I will tell you about.
PPS I hail from the Kerr Clan. Our motto is Sero Sed Serio! For more information about the brave Scotts click here.