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HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer
- zdgman 14y agoStandard Atlassian MO for all of their products. They get you by having what would be a fairly small team in your company (usually 5 people) using their product and they are the trojan horse that then makes you end up purchasing a license.
- locopati 14y agoThat sounds like it's either an unclear arrangement ('trojan horse') or a bad thing ('makes you end up purchasing'). Atlassian makes great products and, if your team/company grows to the size where you need to pay, the cost is far less than the value of time saved. Sometimes, it's worth avoiding the hassle of free/open-source projects for critical tools. I say this is a very happy paying Atlassian paying customer.
- zdgman 14y agoWe pay for Atlassian products at my company as well. I just call their business model the "trojan horse". I personally don't prefer their products but that is not to say they are bad.
- shanelja 14y agoAside from the phone applications, what makes Hipchat better than say, Skype?
- andrewljohnson 14y agoGroup chat, GitHub Integration, persistent, searchable chat logs, Zapier integration to DropBox and Trello.
- mickeyben 14y agoHipChat has an API and a lot of services proposes hooks to post to HipChat. Our "Saloon" usually looks along the line of : GitHub - mickey commented on issue 104 of xxx/fronted: +1 GitHub - yoktan pushed to branch master of xxx/frontend - Txt (c7bd9a3) Jenkins - backend-master - #481 FAILURE after 3 min 18 sec (Open) Bugsnag - Exception in production from frontend in votes#index (details) RuntimeError: # app/controllers/votes_controller.rb:6 - index
- brokentone 14y agoIt's essentially pretty IRC. What makes it better than IRC is a better question. The answer is that you don't have to setup and maintain an IRC server, and have the power of bots through APIs.
- jamesgeck0 14y agoThe other answer is that it's a lot easier to get less-technical people onto it.
- raylu 14y agoHipChat's API's are severely lacking. There's no way to read messages from chat without using their halfway working XMPP implementation on a separate user account. On the other hand, sending and receiving messages to IRC is pretty simple and straightforward. There are also tons of IRC libraries.
- jedberg 14y agoIt's more like IRC, and the one thing that really makes it better is the chat history (which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that). The push notifications when someone messages you when you're offline are pretty nice too.
- StavrosK 14y ago> which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that That's exactly the use case for which I started building http://www.getinstabot.com/ http://www.getinstabot.com/, but I haven't seen much interest, sadly.
- 1123581321 14y agoGreat idea. I signed up. Please keep developing the product!
- StavrosK 14y agoThanks, interest is what will motivate me enough to work on this. I saw your email, I'll email you soon to ask you some things, if that's okay!
- scott_karana 14y agoLooks nice to me! You've got my email now. :)
- StavrosK 14y agoThanks, emailed :-)
- AJ007 14y agoDoes anyone have IRC as a service? I used to run an IRC server for my company, but as mentioned, there is the maintenance part. There is already more work that needs to be done than hours to do it. I would like to see more start ups utilize existing protocols such as RSS and IRC.
- ryanbrunner 14y agoThe biggest difference is that HipChat is primarily about "rooms" and less about messaging individual people (although you can do that too). It makes for much better team workflow, because it enables a lot more passive information sharing. Most people in a room don't want to be actively involved in everything, but they would like to passively just see what's going on. Secondly, it's centralized around a company, so you know that everyone has everyone else on HipChat, unlike Skype, where everyone needs to manage their contact list separately. Finally, the notification features are really nice. I can just @mention someone's name, and it's like summoning them into the room to answer a question for me. It's way smoother than adding someone to a Skype conversation, since they'll be able to trace back the history of the conversation.
- pbreit 14y agoGood summary. HipChat is simply very tuned to the needs of a workgroup, not just simple IMing. I especially found that it was good at notifying via email about a missed chat you likely want to have a look at.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- timedoctor 14y agoRooms can be created on Skype, that's the way we use skype in our business, we create a group chat between all the relevant people and then favorite it and it's the same as a room. The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning. I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat
- ryanbrunner 14y agoI think the difference is that rooms are a focus of HipChat, and an afterthought / hack in Skype. Similar to how individual, "not in a room" conversation is an afterthought in HipChat. In both cases you can technically do it, but the app doesn't go out of it's way to make it easy or well-supported. If you find you're using your favorited lists to chat more than one-on-one conversations, I'd really recommend trying out HipChat. For what it's worth, we regularly use Skype at our office as well as HipChat. They both excel at what they were designed to do, and we don't necessarily see a problem with using two tools if it means you don't have to shove a round peg into a square hole.
- rgrieselhuber 14y agoThe thing that is nice about Hipchat, it pains me to say, is that messages actually get delivered the moment you send them. Skype is completely unpredictable.
- antidaily 14y agoPros: search logs, other integrations Cons: no phone calls! which I use quite a bit. free for teams bigger than 5.
- bcj 14y agoMy company recently started using Skype as a free hipchat-like service. My complaints with it so far have been: -you have to explicitly enable history to have people entering a conversation see it. -When I send a message on my computer, I get a notification about my own message on my phone.
- brc 14y agoI trialled HipChat a little while ago, but there is no phone? For me that was a deal breaker - if it had a skype-like talk option as well, it would serve the purpose. People like the all-in-one tool that Skype is, even if the chat side is weak.
- brown9-2 14y agoMessages sent in a Skype chat room when you are offline are only sent to your client when other members of the room are online. So if you sign on before the rest of the participants in the morning, you don't see any messages sent overnight until someone else joins.
- brokentone 14y agoGenius move. Unless their infrastructure is really tuned for it, there is a cost of doing business under, say $10/mo (not to say that there aren't companies successfully doing micro payments and such). Premium support, CC processing, etc add up. However, using this lower rung as a hook to get people in the door is great, and it feels more honest than a trial window (although I'm certainly not hating on trials)
- samirahmed 14y agoI think this is strategically a good move, as free and Open source alternatives like Kandan would be more attractive to teams of under 5 users than a paid (even though very affordable) solution like Hipchat.
- jedberg 14y agoOne critical thing I recently learned -- Hipchat is run exclusively out of Amazon's US-East region. If you're using Hipchat for anything operational, make sure you aren't also exclusively in US-East. Otherwise, if there is a region-wide issue in Us-East, you're gonna have a bad time.
- orourkek 14y agoGreat point. But speaking from experience, if you're using Us-East exclusively, you're [eventually] gonna have a bad time anyways...
- jedberg 14y agoThis is very true. :)
- anonfunction 14y agoHipChat I hope your taking notes!
- powdahound 14y agoRead you loud and clear. We are split across all 4 US-East availability zones currently, but its true that we are not multi-region - yet.
- jedberg 14y agoHey there. Didn't intend to call you out, just wanted to make sure other's didn't get bit. :) You don't have an email in your profile, but shoot me one and maybe we can chat a bit more.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- beachstartup 14y agodoes anyone know the legality of using/modifying a movie poster in that way?
- bryogenic 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
- orangethirty 14y agoSix people are $12 a month. Five people are $0 a month.
- propelledjeans 14y agoIf you hire a sixth person, I'm sure you can afford $12 a month.
- orangethirty 14y agoBut what if I'm an old customer with 6 people on the team? Now I see that they are giving away what I have been paying for. Not a very strategically sound decision.
- axyjo 14y agoYou've been paying for 6 users. You're still paying for 6 users.
- alittletooraph 14y agoBut what if he just hired that 6th person? Think of all the months he was paying $10!
- aneth4 14y agoI'm sure if you write a nice letter of complaint, you'll get your $100 back and have a pizza party.
- rheide 14y agoThis is awesome news. I use hipchat every day for two different organizations. Great product.
- jtchang 14y agoAwesome. I am just looking into chat options for our small but growing team. As an aside I think IRC is being sold short on this chart: https://www.hipchat.com/compare https://www.hipchat.com/compare Nothing wrong against it since it is mosting a marketing comparison chart. IRC is fairly hard to use if you aren't familiar with it already so I get it. We decided to try out an IRC channel because it was easy to get started, no cost really, and knowing how to connect to IRC is important if you ever want to get support inside #python or #django. Plus lots of other open source projects have IRC so it is good to know.
- namityadav 14y agoDo you mind sharing more details about your decision making process, the services/tools you are using as IRC hosts/clients, etc?
- Fauntleroy 14y agoShameless plug here, re: "IRC is fairly hard to use if you aren't familiar with it already" I'm currently working on a web based IRC client called Relay.js (https://github.com/Fauntleroy/relay.js https://github.com/Fauntleroy/relay.js), which is my attempt at making IRC a little more approachable. It's pretty basic at the moment, but I hope to make it something really special in the coming months.
- zwily 14y agoI've been on the lookout for good web IRC interfaces for years. This looks promising. Thanks!
- aeosynth 14y agoYou could also try subway[1] and kiwiirc[2]. [1]: https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway [2]: https://github.com/prawnsalad/KiwiIRC https://github.com/prawnsalad/KiwiIRC
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- kayoone 14y agoFor <5 people, what does this give that a Skype Group conversation cant especially as people will need to instal/use another client ?
- rgrieselhuber 14y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416691
- namityadav 14y agoWe tried using Skype with our remote team. Of the top of my head, the following problems made us switch: (a) Reliability (We were losing a lot of messages between people. Especially offline messages) (b) Duplicate messages (As all of us have multiple machines, we were getting a lot of duplicate messages, depending on which machines were on and logged-in, and when) (c) Poor search (Searching months old messages is a major hassle in Skype)
- sgk284 14y agoWhen my team and I started using HipChat, I wasn't really sure what to expect (since every chat application prior to it seemed pretty much the same). I've found these benefits: - Works on all of my devices. If someone @mentions me, it'll notify my phone just like a text message and/or email me (unless I disable that). And I can reply from my phone's hipchat client. - Chat rooms and 1-on-1 work seemlessly. Chat rooms can also be public or private. - History is persistent and searchable. - Sharing files is as easy as a click. Sharing screenshots/mockups/images is as easy as copy/paste (we use this a lot) - On the right-hand side of the chat room there is a list of all links & files shared in the room that you can easily search through. - You can have guest access in chat rooms. -It integrates with github and other services so that when we do certain things with our repository, it will notify one of our chat rooms. And a million other little things. There is no single feature that made me think "I must use HipChat, this is awesome.", but rather a bunch of minor things that "just worked" and fit nicely together into a great experience. It's worth every penny.
- yarianluis 14y ago
- tosh 14y agoThis is great news. If you want to see why HipChat makes sense: take a look at our integration with HipChat https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-new-hipchat-integration.html https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-ne... If you have a product that creates more value for your customers if you integrate with HipChat this is now a no-brainer :) Revenue wise integrating was definitely worth it for us.
- alittletooraph 14y agoI like that the project you decided to use in your mockup on your homepage is "Duke Nukem Forever - release once it is perfect and not one second earlier".
- tosh 14y agoWe thought it would be funny :) But unfortunately some people don't get the joke so we might change it going forward. Glad you like it :)
- thomaslutz 14y agoPlease release the self-hosted version, and we will start using it.
- powdahound 14y agoWe're working hard on it. If you'd like to get on the list early, and help us by providing some info, please check here: https://www.hipchat.com/firewall https://www.hipchat.com/firewall
- thomaslutz 14y agoI already did, thanks!
- nubela 14y agoI signed up specifically just so I could have the bitbucket integration. But hey, deadlink. Oh well.
- powdahound 14y agoFixed now - sorry about that. :)
- nubela 14y agoLets see! Thanks!
- foobar2k 14y agoFor those asking "why is HipChat better than X", one of the big reasons lies with the number of integrations with other products. Our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com https://bugsnag.com) has HipChat integration, so you can instantly see errors from your apps appear in your chat room. We've also set up curl scripts to post into chat whenever there is a deploy, or push to GitHub.
- netcraft 14y agoDoes it work with multiple organizations? Can I have an account that is free for me and 4 friends, but also be part of an organization that someone else pays for? Or as a contractor - could I be part of two different paying organizations?
- zalambar 14y agoDisappointing that this is still not supported. The need to be able to join multiple organizations is what prevented me from advocating for my company to switch to HipChat a year ago. Unfortunately it looks like http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestions/2716912-let-me-be-a-member-of-and-sign-in-to-multiple-acco http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestion... has not received much attention.
- netcraft 14y agoLooks like that's not possible. http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64418-how-do-i-sign-in-to-multiple-accounts- http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64418-how-do-... so I wonder how it works for billing - if my boss creates a room that has more than 5 people in it and I join too, is it who opens the room that pays?
- marcins 14y agoOne person creates the "organisation", and then creates users/accounts within that organisation (or invites people). The organisation pays the bills. I assume it's not "first 5 people free" if you have more but either "up to 5 people free' or $2/mo/user - so if you have 6 it's 6 x $2/mo. Similar to Atlassian's other products with their $10/10 user tier. Looking at the Billing screen of our 45 user account it doesn't seem like anything has changed (will still be $90/mo)
- onemorepassword 14y agoHipChat has surprisingly been the most effective productivity tool we've taken up in the past 5 years. After only a month of use, virtually all communication and notification streams (GitHub, Jenkins, Zendesk, systems monitoring) in our company have converged in HipChat. It's hard to imagine we've ever done without.
- phil_ives215 14y agoWe switched from hipchat to hall.com and haven't looked back
- theltrj 14y agoI'm a little unclear, can i connect via an IRC client to this?
- twodayslate 14y agoI think this is the only way? http://jasongarber.com/blog/2012/05/18/connecting-to-hipchat-from-irc http://jasongarber.com/blog/2012/05/18/connecting-to-hipchat...
- bredren 14y agoWe were surprised to see our account go from paid to free this morning. Hipchat has been a great tool for our startup. We had initial pushback that IRC implementations could cover us and be free and better. Hipchat was extremely easy and multiplatform. It just worked. (except animated gifs sometimes) Even our strongest holdout for IRC has at least stopped talking about IRC. The company has been iterating on their new mac os x client with releases every week or two since it launched. I'm still impressed with this company's quality and am psyched that we now have one less bill to pay.
- jpadilla_ 14y agoWe've been using HipChat at Blimp since the very first day, we've even integrated it as our Support Chat. We are only three at the moment but have paid for up to 4 users. One less thing we have to pay for, and still be able to use such a great product.
- greg_mazurek 14y agoThis is a perfect size team for using HipChat. We tried HipChat at Gilt with around 40 engineers and it was too cumbersome because of the number of groups. I hope they finally allowed users to edit their comments. That was one notable issue I had. Also, there was no such thing as a "private" group because admins had access to all groups.
- ianstormtaylor 14y agoAnyone use HipChat and Olark? I'm worried that switching off our regular chat will make me sign on more and our users won't be able to contact us on Olark.
- mathrawka 14y agoIf you had 6 users, you were not converted to a free account (obviously). I had an account that became unneeded today, so I removed it... and then I contacted support about getting the free plan. Their message about contacting support to get switched over is basically a lie because they tell you to delete your account and sign up new. Sure, I'm paying for it now and get value from it, but every dollar matters at this point and if they are gonna help me save $10/month then I'd be happy! But instead I feel jaded.
- powdahound 14y agoHey - Garret from HipChat here. That support info is not correct, and I'll investigate. All you need to do is go to the billing admin area and select the option to cancel your paid subscription. The message there will tell you that you have 5 users and that it's OK to cancel.
- ballard 14y agoI've paid for hipchat in the past for managing teams in multiple timezones across the globe. Flowdock's ability to set tags and easily search conversations is great when you need to find that one temporary server password mentioned by a previous ops shift makes it much more useful in this case. Flowdock take note re: pricing.
- tempestn 14y agoGlad I saw this. We've got a team of three at SearchTempest and have been communicating almost entirely by email and gchat thus far. Have been meaning to try something a bit more feature rich for a while. Was planning to check out Google Hangouts, but HipChat sounds ideal. Will give it a look.
- Vitaly 14y agoI just don't get it how is that they don't understand that they really impair the growth by not having cross-account chatrooms... We switched from Skype to HipChat for our internal company communications, but we still use Skype for chats with all the clients. IF only I could tell them to create an account so we can chat... ugh. And no, I can't just give them access to our account, we have plenty of open rooms that should still be company-only.
- daemon13 14y agoUnfortunately, I missed the IRC era. Can someone recommend good tutorials on:- 1. Using IRC [beginner] & [advanced]? 2. How to set-up own IRC server and which are the good ones?
- timedoctor 14y agoHi there powdahound, what is the main benefit of hipchat versus using Skype? I see on the home page "persistant chat rooms" but I use that feature in skype (I create a chat with several people and then favourite it). I'm not understanding the potential benefit. We have a team of more than 40 people all working virtually.
- ax25 14y agoOr just use Google chat and this: https://github.com/mattlong/hermes https://github.com/mattlong/hermes Of course, until Google pulls the plug.
- ksec 14y agoI am still thinking since the files stored on Hipchat are public ( with a long and hard to guess URL ). What are HN's take on this?