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Introducing Glassboard Premium

Do you love Glassboard? Want more out of it? Want to pay us money?! Today we are proud to announce the introduction of Glassboard premium.

Glassboard premium was created to give you more of what you need from Glassboard – more storage, more boards, the ability to bookmark messages and much more, all for just $5/month.

Heard enough and ready to dive in already? Sign up now!

Now to introduce the goodies available in Glassboard premium!

Don’t forget that message, bookmark it!
We’ve been there. “Where is that one link? That message that I wanted to save?” No more scrolling through all of your board content to find that one important tidbit. Bookmarks will allow you to save a message or comment- forever if you’d like. Once you bookmark a message, it will always be available in your bookmarks.

Kinda like a yearbook, only shorter and more personal. Export that board!
Some boards have a shelf life of only a week, or maybe just a weekend. After that, we wanted to make it easy for you to share your collection of work with everyone – and now you can. Exporting a board will deliver your entire news feed into a web page that you can share with others, including all pictures and video. It includes every message, photo, video, comment and like for the life of the board so you can relive everything!

More Storage. Share the love.
As a premium member, you’ll jump from 100MB to 1GB of storage across all your boards. Yes, you read that right. All of your boards that you chair will get 1GB of storage. It’s not just you who benefits from this, everyone on your boards will benefit also, you snazzy photog you.

More Boards. A LOT more. Keeeep going…
Don’t run out of boards, ever, because now premium members can create an unlimited number of boards.

Keep the conversation going. Transfer board chair to someone else.
We know how it is. As the board chair you sometimes need to hand the reins over to someone else. Now you can. With Glassboard premium, you can transfer your board chair status over to any other premium board member in your board. Now they can WIELD THE POWAH.

Ready to become a Glassboard premium member to reap all of these benefits? Sign up here!

Do you have more questions about Glassboard premium? Talk to us!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Posted in features, launch, news, release notes - 22 August 2012


  • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

    I have to pay to export my data? Not cool.

    • http://twitter.com/iChris Chris Enns

      A free app that you pay $5 once for to get your data out of. Not sure I see a reason to complain really.

    • Jenny_Blumberg

      Since an export is the entirety of a board, it is yours and everyone else’s contribution, including the assets they’ve attached as well. We may in the future offer a simpler, non-formatted export for free accounts, but in order to stay in business to get there we need to start bringing in money :-)

      • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

        Now you’re kind of implying that, should you go out of business, there will be no way for free users to export their data.

        • Jenny_Blumberg

          Like Kyle mentioned above, you still have ownership of whatever you want to put into a board, including your photos and videos. The purpose of export is to have an archived version of what you decided you wanted to include in a Glassboard board. Hope this clears things up.

          • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

            Nothing was unclear. A decent service should allow its users to export their data for nothing more than they were already paying. Thus, a free user ought to be able to export their data for free. It’s fine if it’s an ugly JSON-encoded text file, as long as it is all there, in a usable format.

            If you only allow people to export their data if they pay you money, you are basically holding their data hostage for a ransom.

            That’s not cool.

            I understand you have to pay the bills. I’m not saying what you are doing is illegal. I’m not even saying it’s unethical (though some might). But I am saying it is not cool.

            Either you are fine with it being uncool, or you will make it right. You’re not going to convince me that it’s cool, though.

          • CWarren

            Jesus, who made you the great arbiter of what’s cool? You’re like the guy that shows up at a kegger, is welcome to drink for free, but who leaves pouting when they pass the hat for another.

            “So uncool. That beer was free and so I’m entitled entitled entitled to as much free beer as I want, no matter what it costs you.”

            You have no idea what uncool is. Hint, it’s in the bathroom, hanging over the sink. Go look!

          • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

            I’m not complaining about having to pay for things. The bookmarking, the increased storage capacity, these provide additional value and $5/month is a great price for them.

            Also, providing a nicely formatted exported archive is fine for an additional fee, too.

            My issue is the idea that the ONLY form of export requires payment.

            To use your beer analogy, this is like hosting a kegger where you provide cups and a nice place to hang out but people have to bring their own beer, and you let them hang out and drink their own beer for free, and they can stay as long as they want without paying. Everything is great! But then you announce that if anybody wants to leave, they have to pay to take their own beer home with them. (Beer is not a good analogy for user-produced information, because you can drink it and then it isn’t beer any more, but hopefully I am getting my point across.)

            Unfortunately, a lot of services do this. They think it is totally acceptable to offer to host people’s information for free, then later use their control over that information as leverage against the user that it ostensibly belongs to.

            I’m not alone in this. Read about Google’s Data Liberation Front. Read about the Archive Team. We need to stop this two-faced attitude of “hey you can trust us with your data” then “hey, it was free, you should have known you were taking a risk.”

            I honestly believe the people at Sepia Labs are well meaning, and this is an oversight. Glassboard is great! Why would anybody want to take their data out of it? But if they truly believe their services are valuable on their own merit (which they are), they should have no problem letting their users get their data out on the same terms they put their data in.

            P.S. I’m not the arbiter of cool; a lot of people seem to be upset with me saying something is uncool.

          • http://twitter.com/bwhalley Brian Whalley

            I am really enjoying watching the commenters make you waste more than $5 of your time arguing about this in the comments. Cool.

        • walkerfenton

          Our intention is not to keep you from your data. You could get it today if you knew the APIs. With our “Board Export” feature, our intention is to provide a good looking, easy to share timeline of the interactions in your boards. This has nothing to do we us keeping you from your data, take a look at our TOS and Privacy policies & you’ll see where we stand on content ownership. If this doesn’t, let us know so we can make it more clear. thx

          • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

            API access also requires payment, according to your pricing page.

            Owning my data, in the eyes of the law, doesn’t really matter if I can’t actually get a copy of it, does it?

        • gjgustav

          No, they’re saying is that they need to charge for something to stay in business. If you use this so much that it’s important to you, pay the small amount of $5 and you don’t have to worry. If they go out of business, you won’t have new data to export anyway.

        • Daniel J

          No. She said, “We may in the future offer a simpler, non-formatted export for free accounts, but in order to stay in business to get there we need to start bringing in money.” And she even did it nicely; with a smiley.

          Businesses don’t make a lot of money off of people who never pay them a dime. Vote with your wallet: no pay, no vote.

          • http://www.benzado.com/ Benjamin R.

            Unless I’m missing something, the reasoning is pretty easy to follow. They MIGHT offer a free export, but ONLY IF they stay in business. Therefore, if they go out of business, no export for free users.

            The smiley doesn’t change anything. They need to make money. OK. They have my sympathy. Does that justify anything they want to do? Nope.

            And the idea that free users don’t deserve a say because they haven’t paid anything is also uncool. We’re not talking about trial users of MarsEdit, Daniel. We’re talking about users of a service, who were offered that service for free. The expectations are completely different.

        • Jim

          But, it seems to me that with a no-ad, customer funded service, Glassboard is now less likely to go out of business. All they have to do is keep me happy. So far, that is working out fine.

        • Troy,

          Pay the $5 you cheapo.

          • Lia_hong

            Troy for the win.

        • Guillaume

          Well, if you started putting important data in a free service that was obviously going to offer Pro features, I think you’re the one who put his data at risk, you can’t blame Glassboard for not adding features or not adding them in the order that would suit you the best.

    • Kyle Richter

      Exporting data is a pro feature, you can still store all of your data for free. I don’t see a problem with this.

    • http://twitter.com/bwhalley Brian Whalley

      “A cup of coffee!?”

  • Jason Green

    Glad to see a plan ahead. A couple questions:

    1) Will the premium be applicable to boards or user? For instance, can all of my board members export the board since I’m the head a premium user?

    2) Will this include an update to the iPhone app? Hoping those little quirky bugs get pushed out. (ie, no video showing for the uploader.)

    Thanks for the great app.

    • Jenny_Blumberg

      Hi Jason!

      1) Only premium users who are also the board chair can export a board. The format we provide for download, however, is easy to share with others.

      2) The iPhone app is now 2.2. It is compatible with the premium features. What is that video uploader bug you mention?

      • Jason Green

        I believe it was mentioned in the MacDrifter review as well (http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/08/glassboard-the-anti-facebook.html )

        When you upload a video in the iPhone app, it doesn’t show for the person who uploaded it. it’s just a white space for some time, eventually showing up.

        • Jenny_Blumberg

          Ah I see what you mean now! Something for us to look into. Thanks.

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