Please read our latest blog entry for the most current news and information about Trillian Astra.

Our intention with Build 98 was to enable our subscription code on the server-side and give it a thorough testing with the mixed base of paying and non-paying customers currently in our testing pool. We’re certainly not asking anyone to pay for the beta, but given that many of you are using Trillian Astra as your primary IM client, our actions were perceived as such. We’ll make sure that moving forward we provide advanced notification of any major changes to the beta program, and we apologize for the abrupt way we handled this. While we’re happy to see that many of you consider the product stable enough to use as your primary IM client, we should have taken more care before turning features off and for that we apologize. We’ve re-enabled premium access for all beta testers until the next build, Build 99, by way of apology. Please consider this a more appropriate advanced notification of what’s to come. Also, for those of you who renewed, the members area on our website will have a way to link your Astra and Trillian Pro accounts by the end of the day today.

Many of you have requested additional information on how our subscription model is changing moving forward, and we’ve summarized our current thinking below. Please read on if you’re interested, and please let us know if you have feedback. Thanks again for your support!

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Build 98 is now available.  As of this build, we’ve re-activated our premium membership code, which means those of you who are not current subscribers will now be testing the equivalent of today’s Trillian Basic, and those of you who are active subscribers will continue to test the fully-featured product.  We’re still working out some of the details surrounding what features will be premium and what features will not be, and as such reserve the right to change our minds a few times before the final product.    One thing basic customers will notice is that we’ve pushed a large amount of previously “Pro” functionality back into the free product, including all plugins!  We have some new ideas with regard to monetizing Trillian’s featureset that we hope will continue to keep our free offering competitive while still leaving us enough room to generate the revenues we need to run the business.  Additionally, our full installer has now been updated to 3.1 spec, which means it includes our bundled offerings from our current bundle partners, Ask.com and weather.com.

UI-wise, we’ve streamlined the Trillian Cobalt Minimal interface even further, making the overall experience much more “minimal” than before, something the space-conscious among you should appreciate.  Instant Lookup has finally returned in Build 98, so please let us know if you notice any quirks via Bugzilla.

Note to former customers: As of Trillian Astra, our goal is to move as many of our premium features into the “services” category as possible, which means when your subscription lapses you will automatically revert to Trillian Basic and lose access to said features. As we’re selling more and more services and less and less features, we’re trying to give as much of the base client away for free as possible but still charge for the things that incur cost on our backend. This plan isn’t fully complete yet and likely won’t be until 4.1 and beyond, and so we’re still charging for a few things you might consider client features, but this is our plan moving forward. This is mainly directed at those of you who are planning to extend for $5 and keep “Astra Pro” for life; this will no longer be possible. Minimal extensions ($5) are still allowed, but when your subscription runs out so does your premium access. We’ll be listening closely to beta tester feedback on what features should go into what bucket, so please let us know on the forums what you think. We hope you decide to support our continued efforts at providing a great all-around product and thank you all for all of your dedication and support!

Enjoy the build!