HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer

One 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.

Awesome. I am just looking into chat options for our small but growing team.<p>As an aside I think IRC is being sold short on this chart:<p><a href="https://www.hipchat.com/compare" rel="nofollow">https://www.hipchat.com/compare</a><p>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.<p>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.

HipChat has surprisingly been the most effective productivity tool we've taken up in the past 5 years.<p>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.

This is great news. If you want to see why HipChat makes sense: take a look at our integration with HipChat<p><a href="https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-new-hipchat-integration.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-ne...</a><p>If you have a product that creates more value for your customers if you integrate with HipChat this is now a no-brainer :)<p>Revenue wise integrating was definitely worth it for us.

Aside from the phone applications, what makes Hipchat better than say, Skype?

Does 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?<p>Or as a contractor - could I be part of two different paying organizations?

This 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.<p>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.

For &#60;5 people, what does this give that a Skype Group conversation cant especially as people will need to instal/use another client ?

I'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.

We 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.<p>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.<p>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.

If you had 6 users, you were not converted to a free account (obviously).<p>I had an account that became unneeded today, so I removed it... and then I contacted support about getting the free plan.<p>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.<p>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.

I 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.

For those asking "why is HipChat better than X", one of the big reasons lies with the number of integrations with other products.<p>Our product Bugsnag (<a href="https://bugsnag.com" rel="nofollow">https://bugsnag.com</a>) 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.

Genius 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)

Hi 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.

Glad 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.

We'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.

This is awesome news. I use hipchat every day for two different organizations. Great product.

I 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.

Unfortunately, I missed the IRC era.<p>Can someone recommend good tutorials on:-<p>1. Using IRC [beginner] &#38; [advanced]?<p>2. How to set-up own IRC server and which are the good ones?

Or just use Google chat and this: <a href="https://github.com/mattlong/hermes" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattlong/hermes</a> Of course, until Google pulls the plug.

Anyone 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.

I 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?

I signed up specifically just so I could have the bitbucket integration. But hey, deadlink. Oh well.

Please release the self-hosted version, and we will start using it.

Standard 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.

I'm a little unclear, can i connect via an IRC client to this?

We switched from hipchat to hall.com and haven't looked back

Six people are $12 a month. Five people are $0 a month.

does anyone know the legality of using/modifying a movie poster in that way?