The new (and more secure) SpatialChat is coming soon

Almas Abulkhairov -

Dear SpatialChat Community,

We've been restlessly working on a new significantly re-engineered SpatialChat since last summer.

Our goals for that release are to make SpatialChat:

  • More secure,
  • Faster,
  • More scalable for future,
  • Capable of integrations with other products (like Google Calendar, Miro, Figma, Google Docs, etc),
  • Simpler in terms of the billing logic - no more participant-minutes!

Thoughts about participant-minutes

Although for us it was a straight-forward approach to put participant-minutes (our internal infrastructure cost is participant-minutes based), it was hard and unpredictable to control the usage for our customers. Although I need to personally thank each one of you for understanding this concept.

Now after millions of people used SpatialChat, we’ve collected some data and patterns around predictability of such usage, and also we’ve become one of the largest worldwide customers of our infrastructure vendors with your support - this allowed us to be able to scale infrastructure and get rid of participant-minutes.

New pricing

  • SpatialChat will be free for up to 25 users, 1 space per team limit and participant-minute free.
  • Meaning that on average it is more awesome than zoom. You know. The zoom :)
  • There will be Day Pass, Monthly and Yearly plans for your one-off events or remote team.
  • Day Pass will be at $2/user/day.
  • Monthly plan will be at $7/user/month.
  • Yearly plan will be at $6/user/month billed annually.
  • Options will be available to upgrade to more spaces per Team.
  • There will also be unlimited event options if you are conference company or events agency.

More secure

As you know SpatialChat has been an anonymous video communication service from the beginning. Now we are adding user accounts, authentication, and guest invitation logic to our product. You will be able to manage who exactly can participate in your space: your team members or invited guests. If you need your space to be open in anonymous mode as before - we thought about this and kept an option for your space to remain public. We will share more news about the changelog after we release an update.

Migration plan

  • Starter Plan will be moved with the same parameters but without any participant minutes (120 capacity, 5 rooms in Space available, $50/month). Click here for more details.
  • Release deployment will happen starting from Monday, February 28th 10 PM (CET) and can affect the system until Wednesday (March 2nd).
  • We’re going to:
    • Migrate all the data like (Spaces, rooms, settings, elements in Rooms, billing info).
    • For each Space, we will make a team with this Space. After the release, you can add more than one Space to one Team.
    • If you have more than one Space for one account (email address) we will make a Team for each of them with their own billing info.
    • After the release, you won’t need an Admin link anymore. You can just invite people through the Users section in your Team details and pre-define a role for each of them. If anybody will use an Admin link after the release we will ask this user to auth and after that add him to the Team which connects with this Space with the role Team Admin.
  • During the release there might be some trouble with:
    • Images/backgrounds/gifs/videos and other materials inside Space,
    • Video or audio inside Breakout or Stage rooms,
    • Connection to Spaces,
    • Messages in Room Chat of Direct Chat, 
    • Other problems like losing something or somebody.

Subscribe to this "What's New" space for more news and the changelog one we release the update.

If you have any questions regarding the update or concerns - just comment here under this post.

I sincerely hope that this deployment downtime affects you as little as possible. My team is working very hard on this one.

UPD March 1st 8pm EET:
The deployment and scheduled downtime will happen tomorrow, March 2nd at around 10pm EET