FAQ - Accounts

What's the difference between free and paid accounts?

Both free and paid accounts look and operate the same. Both use the same application and can be totally customized. Both offer web-based control panels.

We encourage people to test out our service by signing up for a free account first. You can see if you like it and more importantly, you can see how your customers like it. A free account also gives you the opportunity to wait for your PULPchat to become popular before you start paying us. Once you do, there are a number of benefits to paid accounts.

More People
Free accounts allow you to have up to 5 people in your chat room at a time. Another way of saying this is that free accounts are limited to 5 concurrent users. We don't care how many people visit your PULPchat over the course of a day. You could have thousands. There just can't be more than 5 people online at a time.

Paid accounts allow you to have more people in your chat room. The price of each paid account is determined mainly by the maximum number of concurrent users. You can start off with a 25 user account and when your site becomes popular and people are struggling to get in because your PULPchat is always full, you can upgrade to a 50 or 100 user account.

More Control
Paid accounts provide additional online control panels like the User Manager and Layout Editor. The User Manager allows you to assign moderators and kick or ban users. The Layout Editor let you make dozens of changes to the appearance of your PULPchat.

Most paid accounts offer logging and recording. Daily log files identify each visitor's screen name, time they logged in, how long they were on, browser type, and ip address. Recording provides a complete daily transcript of all conversation and is available for an additional fee with all paid accounts.

Separate Servers
We keep the paid accounts and free accounts on different servers. There are so many free accounts that the free servers can become sluggish during periods of heavy traffic. We didn't think this would be fair to paying customers so we separated the two.

The free servers are supported mainly by donations and most people are completely satisfied. After all, its a free service with no banner ads! If you need guaranteed reliability, 25 hours a day, then you need a paid account.

Priority Support
We strive to offer the best support anywhere. We want to help everyone but questions from paid accounts are answered first. Usually we get to everyone so quickly that no one knows the difference. Some paid accounts offer Priority Support which guarantees a response within 24 hours. Additional Service Level Agreements are available for paid accounts. Email info@pulpchat.com for more information.


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