New releases of an online service can be a bit jarring, because you get up in the morning and find that the system has changed.  But, that is the price of progress.  Sometime in the next two weeks, we will post a new release of Assembla.com that makes changes to the user/start page and user tabs, and to some of the subscription plans.

New user/start navigation

We will remove the user tab bar.  It's confusing to new users, who must figure out how to get to it with the user/start link.  "Too many clicks" they tell us.  The "Welcome" page, which appears whenever you go home, is much more popular.  So, we are moving the user features to a new "Start" page on the home tab bar.  You will see something like this:

This is simpler than the existing dashboard-style start page.  If you really want to use the old start page, you can still get that with the link in the upper right, and bookmark it.

In the future, this arrangement will make it easier for us to give you a branded portal, with your own URL, where you can interact with clients and colleagues on your own projects.  The user start page will fit inside your branded portal.

You can also see that we are moving to plain square tabs.  They are easier to customize.  You can change the color in the stylesheet, and you do not need a new rounded tab image.

Replacing the Metered plan

We will make some significant new free offers, and we will remove the "metered" subscription plan.  Do not worry.  You can keep your existing metered subscription for as long as you like. If you want a new metered plan, just sign up for it in the next ten days.  You will get the 30 day free trial, and after that you can either drop it in favor of the new plan structure, or keep it.  We will continue to honor it, as we continue to honor the $2 metered plans from more than a year ago.

Metered is our most popular plan, but it does not bring in much revenue because of low average prices.  Most people use the metered plan as a low-cost plan for 2 or 3 people.  Good news!  We believe that the new free offer will satisfy about half of the people that now pay for metered. We have about 1000 subscribers with only one user.  Are they using it for personal backup?  Or are they sharing passwords?  It's a mystery.  But, more than half of them should be happy with the upcoming free plans.