TL;DR: Channitor will be converting to a freemium app (free, but with premium tiers for advanced users) in the near future. This lets us justify the time investment needed for new features the community has been asking for, and ensures Channitor continues to add value. The change should have minimal impact on functionality for those who migrate to the free tier.
When will this happen
The exact cutover date is still TBD, but we will be slowly rolling out some beta features over the next couple months. The transition will NOT occur before Nov 1st, 2023. We will update this page as the timeline for the update crystallizes.
Why
Unfortunately, we are people and not AI, so we do need to buy food & have a place to sit and code new features for Happybara apps.
Channitor started as a way to scratch our own itch, but as it has picked up steam, it has steadily grown in infrastructure & support costs, along with an ever growing backlog of feature requests from the community.
While we would love to build every great idea, we needed to prioritize investment in our paid apps (e.g., Nightowl, shameless plug :D), which historically, has not included Channitor.
By adding paid tiers to Channitor, we are able to justify building features that we’ve been adding to the backlog over the years. This includes auto-archiving, channel filtering for auto-join functionality, and prefix support (to name a few).
But I like FREE
We will continue to offer a free tier for Channitor which will be almost the same as the existing app, except a few tweaks here and there. We are striving to have small teams feel minimal impact from the change if they aren’t interested in the new capabilities. We will also be offering a generous discount for any teams interested in converting to a paid tier as a “Thank You” for being an existing Channitor user.
Questions/Comments/Concerns?
We welcome constructive feedback and questions – feel free to reach out either through our in-Slack support chat, or email at support@happybara.io. Thank you for supporting the Happybara team as we strive to serve you with great software for many years to come.