Goplan 2 is now just around the corner. We’re adding the final bits of polish and wiping out the last few bugs, but the product as a whole is done. We’re happy about the feedback we’ve been getting and the excitement that people feel about it being close to release. It makes sense - since we’re about to relaunch the product - to talk about how this will affect paying customers. We have good news.

A little background

There are a whole lot of solutions out there for people who are looking for hassle-free online project management. In fact, since we first started on Goplan (the first version) this market has clearly become saturated with products that do what we are doing too. That is a fact, and there’s no denying it. However, we also believe we do some things better than the rest. One of the reasons why we decided to launch Goplan 2 as a full rewrite was to make that difference stand out.

That being said, differences must not come only in functionality (although as I’m sure you’ve seen on our GP2 previews, that counts too) but in pricing. We’ve been wondering about the escalating prices for online apps for a while. We won’t name names because it wouldn’t be useful, but there are a few products out there (not necessarily project management apps) that are way too expensive for what they provide and their real cost of operation.

Anyway, enough critic and on to the real stuff. We’re bringing prices down quite a bit. In fact, we’re simplifying by cutting one of our existing plans and adjusting the features/limits for all the others. Here’s how our plans look right now.

Old plans versus the new plans

Here’s the current Goplan:

• Personal ($10/mn): 12 projects, 8 users, 300mb of file storage
• Startup ($20/mn): 30 projects, unlimited users, 1.5gb of file storage
• Professional ($50/mn): 100 projects, unlimited users, 6gb of file storage
• Unimited ($100/mn): unlimited projects, unlimited users, 25gb of file storage

We actually like these prices, but they have one striking problem - user numbers. This is possibly the one thing that most dramatically differentiates large companies from smaller ones. So it makes sense to bring prices down and scale the plans based on company size. That’s what we did. Here are the new plans (the Personal plan is gone, because we brought the startup price down and features up):

• Startup ($10/mn): 15 projects, 5 users, 15 external collaborators, 10gb of storage
• Professional ($35/mn): 40 projects, unlimited users/collaborators, 25gb of storage
• Unlimited ($80/mn): Everything is unlimited

This makes us even happier. We always wanted to bring all prices down dramatically, and that’s what we’re doing. We hope you’re happy about this too.

Upgrading to Goplan 2

One other thing people have been asking is how we’ll do the upgrade between people and companies who have a Goplan 1 account, into a Goplan 2 account. If you had a Personal or Startup account on GP1, you will be upgraded to the new Goplan 2 Startup plan, which at worst gives you more bang for less buck. If you had a Professional or Unlimited account, you’ll be upgraded to the new Professional and Unlimited accounts, which bring prices down and also pack more features.

The move between Goplan 1 and Goplan 2 will be gradual - this is a complicated move, and we won’t risk your data by doing it automatically for everyone. Come launch, we’ll have Goplan 1 and 2 running side by side, upgrading accounts on a case by case basis. You’ll be able to request the move for your account, and the process shouldn’t take long (our estimate is that with the exception of very large accounts, the migration takes only a few minutes, and you’re ready to go).

We’ll do a post on launch explaining the move, and as always we’ll be available both over email and phone if you have questions or need help. We’re also looking forward to your comments on these plans and updates. Thanks!

There’s a lot of designers who use Goplan to manage their projects and organize their creative output. This post is for everyone, although it may be particularly interesting if you’re a designer as well. Although we already talked about the changes coming to the file management functionality (click here if you haven’t read about them yet), there’s something we didn’t mention then.

The new image gallery (accessible from the File navigation) shows thumbnails for all the files uploaded to a specific project on Goplan, allowing you to quickly get a glimpse of artwork, schematics, diagrams or photos. With the new tagging and filtering mechanism, it also becomes really easy to filter out through the photos and focus on the ones you’re really interested on.

All this (and a lot more) coming really soon with Goplan 2. In the next couple of posts we’ll talk about the new plans and of the minor updates coming. Keep an eye out!

Hey everyone! Some of you might have noticed that we made a few updates to our servers today, as the site and blog (the application was not affected) were inaccessible for a while (for some people the downtime for the blog was of about 4 hours). The downtime was caused by some maintenance updates on our site and blog server. These problems have now been solved and both site and this blog are back to normal. Let us know if you run into any problems.

Since we’re talking about our website and blog, it makes sense to remind you that when we launch Goplan 2, we will be merging all our domains into one. This means you won’t need to visit the site on one URL and the application on another. Everything (site, blog and the application servers) will all be accessible from goplanapp.com. You don’t need to make any changes, obviously, as we’ll continue supporting the old domains for a while, and redirecting you to the right place for convenience if you visit them.

Time to start talking not about what we changed in previous functionality and UI, but about the new goodies. First however, it makes sense to talk about our previous chat functionality and how it had an impact on our decision to add status updates to Goplan.

Goplan 1 includes real-time chat functionality. Although it seemed like a good idea when we implemented it, we’ve come to realize through our own experience and user feedback that it required constant attention and a dedicated tab. When you’re trying to work, thats not that great. So we decided to go with a different paradigm for how we approach team-wide communication. Enter status updates.

If you use Twitter or Friendfeed you’re already familiar with the concept of activity streams or status updates. We’re bringing that concept into goplan for several reasons, the most important of which is that it is unobtrusive. If you need to know what your team is up to, you just check the team-wide status updates page and you’re done. Updating the status is super easy because there’s a readily available form on top of all pages - you just need to click “Update your status” to slide it down.

I suspect people who use Twitter will immediately see the benefit of having these updates on their company dashboard and projects. We’re also planning on having these status updates go to your IM (Google Chat, Jabber, hopefully others), and/or integrate with your account on Twitter, which will definitely be exciting.

We think this is great - and we hope you like it as well. There’s more stuff coming, and while we’re slowing down our posting frequency (there’s only so much we can/want to spoil about the upcoming launch), we’re also getting closer and closer to getting Goplan 2 out there, so keep an eye out. And if you have any feedback or ideas, let us know!