1. Am I affected by the new plans?

If you’re currently a Free user with an individual account (i.e., not an account for your whole company) then you will be migrated to our Basic Plan in early November. This new plan will have the following differences:

• You can receive up to 10 alerts of any kind per month (see below, “What are alert credits?”). After that you’ll need to upgrade, or wait until the next month in your billing cycle before you can receive up to 10 more.
• All your SMS’s will go through our high quality paid gateway, which increases the likeliness of their delivery, will be better formatted, and will come from the same phone number consistently.
• You can now send SMS notifications internationally.
• You can now check email at a Microsoft Exchange account.

If you are currently on the Monthly Start plan, you were just upgraded to the monthly version of our Pro plan, which means you now have all the features of our previous Pro plan (checking more email accounts and faster notifications) plus the new features that the old Yearly Pro users received with their upgrade.

If you are currently a Yearly Pro user, you are now part of the yearly version of the Pro Plan, which means the following upgrades for your account:

• You now can receive up to 1000 alerts, of any kind–Voice, SMS, iPhone push, etc.
• You will now receive instant alerts, rather than an alert after a few minutes.
• You will continue to pay the same price as before (which is at least $11 less than the current new Pro plan’s yearly version).

2. What are Alert Credits? Do I need to think about them?

Alert Credits, or the monthly alerts you’re allotted each month may be important to you. Any time you receive an alert–regardless of whether it’s by SMS, iPhone, Android, email, IM, Voice, or Twitter–it reduces your alert credits. In the past, we only tracked paid SMS and Voice notifications, but now all forms of notifications are counted equally.

If you are a casual AwayFind user, it’s likely that you receive fewer than 10 alerts per month. If that’s the case, then you won’t need to upgrade to continue using all the features of AwayFind you’re used to.

If you are an active AwayFind user, upgrading to the Personal plan will allow you to receive 100 alerts per month, which is about 5 alerts on any given workday–this is more than enough for the vast majority of our active users. In addition to being able to receive more alerts, you’ll also be notified about 4x faster when an urgent email arrives

If you are a big AwayFind user (we love you!), then you’ll want to check out our Pro plan, which allows you to receive 1000 alerts per month–which is enough for just about all our users (unless you’re using AwayFind as a dispatch service, it’s nearly impossible to send more than 40-50 alerts per day). Along with being able to receive more alerts, Pro users receive alerts nearly instantly when an email arrives.

There are other differences between our plans, which are summarized on our Plans & Pricing page.

3. If I run out of Alert Credits, what happens?

As you begin to run out of credits, we will send you an email to warn you. If you’re on the iPhone, we will warn you right from the device (with the ability to upgrade).  [update pending Apple approval, est. by Nov 7)

Please note that even if you cannot receive alerts, we will continue to process urgent messages and place them in your AwayFind Inbox, which is available on the web and in our Android/iPhone apps. We may change this in the future.

4. Why are Google Apps and Exchange available in the Basic plan but not in the Personal plan?

In addition to launching our new individual plans, we’ve today also announced our group plans, which are better designed to accommodate Google Apps and, perhaps in the future, Exchange plans.

For people who use AwayFind for business purposes, we’re continuing to design features that excel for business needs and come at a premium, but affordable, price. For people who only need one license but use Google Apps, we believe the $10 package which includes all the Pro features you will likely need is a pretty good deal. And the new AwayFind Gadget is (at the time of this writing) the best way to experience AwayFind in Gmail.

For our existing users who are concerned about this and would rather use AwayFind’s individual Pro plan, we’ve offered a hefty discount on our Pro plans for a limited time–if you haven’t received that (and you’re reading this in October 2011), please email us at support AT awayfind.com.

As time goes on, we will continue to offer different features to business customers. Our rates are either the same or have declined for our group editions, so we hope you’ll take advantage of them. We can’t promise that we’ll offer these prices in the future.

5. Why all the changes? I liked AwayFind before.

There are a number of reasons that range from serving a wider array of customers with our Basic package to providing an affordable package for our active users.

To read a lot more (and a more personal story) about these changes, here’s more background on this from our Founder, Jared Goralnick.

To date, we’ve charged people based on which features they use rather than the value they get out of AwayFind.  One way to think of it: right now we charge people for the meatballs on top of the pasta, but the pasta is free.

Let me give an example: we’ve been charging a subscription for sending SMS outside of the United States but offering unlimited push notifications for iPhone users.  The underlying technology is the same, the benefits of AwayFind are the same, but we’d been charging for the SMS notification and not the iPhone one.

So I have to ask: why should someone in India with a less-expensive phone pay to receive one SMS while someone with a $650 phone receive 50 alerts per day for free?

The inherent inbalance here bugs me, but it’s not just about who gets access to AwayFind. It’s about the benefit they receive.  International SMS does cost us more than iPhone push notifications, but, well, just because the meatballs cost more money doesn’t mean the pasta should be free.

That’s neither a sustainable business model (9 people’s wages far exceed our SMS bill) nor is it correlating our price with the value of our product, which is that that we help you to spend less time in your email while being more responsive to the people who matter.

So our new plans now track how many alerts one sends, not whether those alerts are sent over SMS. IM, iPhone, Android, Voice–they all count as one alert credit.

And we’ve set the threshold for free accounts relative to how much value you’re getting out of AwayFind–if we’re helping you to escape your inbox more than ten times in a month, then the cost is $5 per month or $50 per year.  This is part of a new plan and price (at one third the cost of our previous plans), which we’ve introduced for those who are notified 10-100 times per month.

If AwayFind saves you a few hours and opens up a couple business opportunities each month–then I trust that time is worth well more than $5.

But if AwayFind isn’t a big part of your workflow and you get just a few notifications per month, now AwayFind won’t discriminate on your location or phone–you now can receive SMS anywhere in the world and even use AwayFind with your Exchange account…for up to ten notifications.

With these announcements, we’ve also announced additional features for businesses (like our Google Apps Marketplace product) and business users (like INSTANT alerts), and we’ve upgraded all of our existing Monthly Starter users to our new Monthly Pro plan, at no additional charge.

I hope all these changes make AwayFind that much more useful to you.  There are still tens of millions of people who spend more than half their days staring at their inbox.  We want to reach them, and we hope this is one more step in that direction.

All Notifications Are Now Equal

In the past, we tracked how many SMS and Voice calls you sent and allowed an unlimited number of other notifications.  Now, all our paid plans allow a ton more notifications, but all notifications are treated the same.  Whether you receive an alert by iPhone, Android, SMS, IM, email, or Twitter DM, each one of these notifications will count toward your total credits that you can receive per month.

We’ve Introduced a $5/Month Personal Plan

Now for just $5 you can receive alerts 4x faster than with our free plan–a notification of anything urgent within about 5 minutes.  You also can receive notifications when someone emails you right before your appointment with them.  Both of these features were previously priced at $15 month, and included 60 SMS notifications…now these are available for $5/month or $50/year and include 100 notifications of any kind.

All Monthly Starter Plans are Now Monthly Pro Users

We’ve upgraded anyone who signed up for the Monthly Starter edition of AwayFind to the new Monthly Pro edition.

Pro Users Now Have Instant Alerts

Pro Users now receive alerts within a few seconds of an urgent email arriving, instead of waiting a few minutes.  Read more about instant alerts here.

Free Plans Now Receive Any Kind of Alert, But Only Ten Per Month

A lot of users don’t send many notifications for month, and those users can now receive those alerts over SMS anywhere in the world.  However, those who receive more than ten notifications per month will need to upgrade to the new Personal plan or the Pro plan to receive more than ten alerts in a month.

A New Max Plan

Some people push AwayFind to the limit.  Maybe they check 10 email accounts.  Maybe they monitor their company’s support account and do all kinds of advanced routing.  Well, now we can support you better with our new Max plan.  At $50/month, Max subscribers can monitor an unlimited number of email accounts and send an unlimited number of instant alerts.  We know quite a few customers who were always buying more credits or asking for more email accounts…now they can push our software much further.

More Information?  Questions?

These new plans both widen the audience for AwayFind and address many of the requests we’ve had over the past year.

We’d love your feedback.  Feel free to leave a comment below, visit our forum, or write us any time at support [at] awayfind.com.

1.  Instant status reporting for alerts

If you already have an alert setup for a topic or sender, not only can you see that there’s an alert created but also how you’ll be notified and when it will expire.

Right within your email view you can see that you’ll be notified by an iPhone push notification if the author of this email emails you again in the next week:

2.  1-click settings for alerts

Instead of having to click several  times every time you create an alert…it now takes just one click (“Follow this Person” or “Follow this Topic”).  We even store your most frequent settings. But of course, you can always modify the settings for each alert you create.

For instance, you might generally want to be notified by iPhone for one week from now if a person writes or a topic is updated.  You can set [iPhone, one week] as the 1-click preference for your account.  To set your 1-click preferences, click the Settings link right from the gadget.

3.  Faster, more fun setup for new users (pardon me, but I think saving time is fun)

While existing users don’t need to worry about this (since their account’s already configured!), we’re pretty excited about our new setup process, which takes place entirely within the AwayFind gadget that appears right at the bottom of your emails.  You can finish the setup right there, or even with your phone over SMS.  This is pretty much the entire setup:

If you’re on Google Apps, learn more and try it out today in our new Google Apps Marketplace edition!

To date, we’ve worked with nearly two thousand companies to enhance their email productivity, and we’re now releasing some major updates as well as our upgraded plans for businesses.

Here’s what we’ve introduced (and more is coming soon)…

New Administration Control Panel

In addition to Google’s built-in Apps dashboard, we’re now offering a Control Panel for Administrators.  This Control Panel enables administrators to provision specific users for AwayFind, check the status on any account issues, and generally better manage AwayFind for the whole company.  Marketplace users, access this here…

Company-Wide Billing

Previously, companies either had no mechanism to pay for AwayFind’s premium features, or individuals had to purchase those features themselves.  Now all AwayFind’s billing is centrally managed.  And plans start at just $10/month (with discounts for both volume seats and yearly purchases).  Our plans will soon be listed here (they’re the same as the Pro plan, except with 500 alerts per month), and for now existing admins can see the pricing within their account.

Super-Quick Setup Process, Right Within Gmail

Google Apps users users can now setup their AwayFind gadget without even visiting our website, and the whole setup process only takes about 60 seconds.  It’s as simple as entering your phone number or installing our mobile app for iPhone or Android.

New Gadget Design, New Marketplace Design

All of the above changes are part of a complete redesign of our business product.  Everything blends in better with Gmail’s design cues, is super quick, and now loads much faster.

Learn more about our new Gmail Contextual gadget here…

Instant Alerts

In business, time matters.  So now when a Marketplace user is waiting for an email, they won’t have to wait long.  Now, with AwayFind’s Instant Alerts, they’ll be alerted within a few seconds of the email arriving.

All of these features together make AwayFind feel like an easy-to-manage, built-in part of Gmail.  With no plugins to install and no passwords for your users to memorize, Google Apps Marketplace users have a path with no obstacles toward combating email interruptions.

Grab AwayFind for Google Apps Marketplace today.

It only takes minutes.  Nothing compared to the hours spent in the inbox every single day, right?

Some things can wait.

But some things can’t.

Some people can afford to wait, and be patient.  Here at AwayFind, we not are particularly patient.

If you’re the same, we’ve got a treat for you today.  

You know that email that you absolutely, positively need to know about now?  Want to wait five or ten minutes for it?  Now you don’t have to!

With our current alerts, some users still find themselves checking their email for something they need to know about NOW.  And that’s no fun.  :-/

So that’s what instant alerts are.  You get notified NOW—literally—when the messages you need arrive.  This is available on our Pro, Max and Google Apps Marketplace plans.

And when you sign up today, you can give it a spin for 30 days at no cost.  

The wait is over.  Now, give it a try!

On both the Important People and Waiting for NOW screens we’ve added a sophisticated autocomplete tool that makes it lightning fast to add contacts (these contacts will trigger AwayFind alerts).

When I’m waiting for an email from one of my rockstar engineers like Sergio Kaszczyszyn I don’t have to remember how he spells his name or what his email address is.  Now it takes about 5 seconds to tell AwayFind when you need to know about something–It’s like productivity just got productive!

It’s simple when you look at it…but that’s the point : ).  And it’s a joy to use:

Grab the latest version on the iOS AppStore now!

Today we announce AwayFind for Android. If you’re an existing AwayFind user, you’ll now be able to route urgent emails to your Android phone or tablet. And, unlike with our (very popular) SMS alerts, you can read the whole message and even reply without a visit to the distracting world of your inbox.

We’ve made the setup super easy:

1. Setup a Gmail or Google Apps account in less than a minute (or setup Exchange or IMAP accounts on the web).
2. Then just decide which people should trigger an alert.
3. Done.

You will be alerted with an Android push notification when urgent messages from these senders arrive, so you can stay away from your inbox the rest of the time. You can still use the other AwayFind tools you love, such as our Gmail plugin and calendar integration–both of which take just a minute or two to setup on the web.

Grab AwayFind free from the Android Market!

And for those who haven’t discovered our great iPhone app, that’s available here.

Today we’re excited to announce “People I’m Meeting Today” alerts.  Whether you use Google or Outlook Exchange for your calendar, the setup takes all of 5 seconds.

You can configure it on the web:

You could also grab the latest iPhone app and navigate to Settings—>People I’m Meeting Today

It works automatically—there’s nothing to setup or think about.

If you and Keith are meeting soon and he sends you an email, that email will turn into an AwayFind alert (see first image above).

When you create appointments in your calendar, just note the full name or email address of the person you’re meeting with.  (Calendar invitations sent over email do this automatically).  This can be in the subject, body, or invitations area of the calendar appointment, but here’s an example:

AwayFind looks at your calendar to determine who you’re meeting with today (from the example above, it would look for an email from Bill Gates or Keith Ludlow or even Microsoft partnership).

If any of those people email within a few hours of the appointment, that email turns into an alert.  You can specify the exact time period—from 1 to 36 hours.  Here’s the email that trigered the alert:

So many ways this saves you.

AwayFind’s got you covered for when people email to…

• Say they’ll be late
• Change the location at the last minute
• Ask for you to bring something to the meeting.

You don’t even need email on your phone—we can send these alerts over SMS, IM, or even call you.  Let us know what you think.  And close your inbox!

If you’re a new user, it should be straightforward to get yourself setup.  If you’re an existing user, just visit https://orchant.awayfind.com/admin/setup_accounts.php, choose your Exchange version, and enter your email address:

• If you use a newer (2007-2010) version of Exchange (with AutoDiscover) we’ll just need your password (which we store encrypted).
• If you use Exchange 2003 or do not have AutoDiscover enabled, we’ll likely need a few more settings, like the URL you use to check your webmail (OWA server) or your Exchange Web Services address (EWS).

Then you’re all set.  You can manage AwayFind from awayfind.com or with our iPhone application.