A year ago we made HipChat free for teams of five, and since then thousands of teams have learned how great chat can be. But we believe that teams of every size deserve the power of HipChat.

So today, we’re excited to announce a new subscription plan that gives you unlimited HipChat users – for free.

Here are the two ways to use HipChat:

• HipChat Basic (free): Group chat and 1-to-1 messaging for every person on your team, regardless of team size.
• HipChat Plus ($2/user/month): All of the features of HipChat Basic, plus video calling and unlimited, searchable message history.

You can check out the full pricing page for details.

What if I’m currently paying for HipChat?

You’ll get HipChat Plus automatically. Your features and price will stay exactly the same.

What if my team is currently using HipChat for free?

Starting today, you can add as many users as you want for free. Now there’s nothing stopping you from inviting every person in your company to HipChat.

In order to make HipChat Basic free for larger teams, we’ve added some new constraints. We worked hard to make sure they would work for small teams while showing larger teams the value of HipChat Plus. The new constraints are: file storage is capped at 5 GB (far more than the average team uses) and you can search the last 25,000 messages (about six months of messages for the average team of five).

We’ve also given current free users access to HipChat Plus features for the next 30 days.

Enjoy the free-for-all

We think every team in the world will benefit from HipChat. We’re introducing free HipChat Basic today so that every team can.

A lot of teams are using consumer chat services simply because they’re free. We want to show them how good chat can be when it’s actually designed for teams. And we want to make it easy for teams to start using HipChat without worrying about credit cards, invoicing, or expense reports.

If you’re still using consumer IM tools for work, “it’s free” is no longer an excuse. Get chat that’s built for your team.