JMP has been in beta for over six years, and today we are finally launching! With feedback and testing from thousands of users, our team has made improvements to billing, phone network compatibility, and also helped develop the Cheogram Android app which provides a smooth onboarding process, good Android integration, and phone-like UX for users of that platform. There is still a long road ahead of us, but with so much behind us we’re comfortable saying JMP is ready for launch, and that we know we can continue to work with our customers and our community for even better things in the future.  Check out our launch on Product Hunt today as well!

JMP’s pricing has always been “while in beta” so the first question this raises for many is: what will the price be now? The new monthly price for a customer’s first JMP phone number is now $4.99 USD / month ($6.59 CAD), but we are running a sale so that all customers will continue to pay beta pricing of $2.99 USD / month ($3.59 CAD) until the end of August. We are extending until that time the option for anyone who wishes to prepay for up to 3 years and lock-in beta pricing. Contact support if you are interested in the prepay option. After August, all accounts who have not pre-paid will be put on the new plan with the new pricing. Those who do pre-pay won’t see their price increase until the end of the period they pre-paid for.  The new plan will also include a multi-line discount, so second, third, etc JMP phone numbers will be $2.45 USD / month ($3.45 CAD) when they are set to all bill from the same balance.  The new plan will also finally have zero-rated toll free calling.  All other costs (per-minute costs, etc) remain the same, see the pricing page for details.

The account settings bot now has an option “Create a new phone number linked to this balance” so that you can get new numbers using your existing account credit and linked for billing to the same balance without support intervention.

Thanks so much to all of you who have helped us get this far.  There is lots more exciting stuff coming this year, and we are so thankful to have such a supportive community along the way with us.  Don’t forget we’ll be at FOSSY in July, and be sure to check out our launch on Product Hunt today as well.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

JMP is 6 years old today!  When we launched in 2017 we had no idea exactly how far we’d go, or that we’d be making one of the most popular chat clients on F-Droid (that is Cheogram Android, which is based on Conversations).  Last year we called JMP “phone-feature-complete” and since then we’ve made all of JMP’s features even easier to use, shepherding big improvements to various Jabber clients, including Movim and Dino, while continuing to provide first-class telephony and messaging features in our flagship mobile app: Cheogram Android.

With so many of the edges now smoothed, and a new onboarding flow almost ready to go, it’s now time to announce: JMP will be leaving beta this year!

What does that mean?  Primarily this is our vote of confidence (as the JMP and Cheogram team) that JMP, and apps we develop such as Cheogram Android, are ready for widespread use.  While of course there will still be improvements to make, we believe it will be able to be recommended to your friends and family (especiall Android users) without reservation.

Naturally there are a couple things to do yet to make that happen, and one of them is to put Cheogram Android in the Play Store at last.  This will be a paid (but still free-as-in-freedom) app that will include one month of JMP service.  Of course, you will still be able to get Cheogram Android from all the other places you can already get it (such as F-Droid and our own repos/APKs).

The other main thing is to set a final post-beta monthly price for JMP.  And, while it won’t take effect until we launch later this year, we are able to now officially announce it: US$4.99/month, with incidental pricing remaining the same (i.e. extra/international minutes will remain what they are now).  Note that there will be discounts for additional JMP numbers linked to your primary JMP number, and also (before JMP leaves beta) a chance to lock in the existing pricing for a period of time.  Having never changed the price since we started JMP 6 years ago, and given the inflation and our own staffing costs since then, we feel the new price will allow JMP to remain both sustainable, and able to face new challenges and exciting opportunities going forward (like the EU’s DMA, for one).  We want to make JMP the best phone number service, and Cheogram the best gateway to everything in the world!

Speaking of Cheogram, a JMP newsletter these days wouldn’t be complete without mention of new Cheogram Android features (2.12.1-2 released in APK form and Cheogram F-Droid repo today!):

• it will now offer to setup Dialer integration automatically when available
• the Call Logs (cdrs) command replaces the usage command (giving you more info)
• the new onboarding flow is improved even more
  
• admins of a Snikket instance can create a new Jabber ID and JMP number all inside the app now (see the video demo)
• new theme: any colour you want! (requires Android 11 or higher)

Note that the Call Logs (cdrs) command will roll out to everyone in about a week.  If you’d like to try it before then, please send a private inquiry to JMP support and we’ll activate it for you.

Lastly, some of you may be interested to know that the JMP/Cheogram team are going to be venturing out to a conference for the first time since March 2020!  In particular, most of the JMP/Cheogram team will be attending FOSSY this year, in Portland, Oregon, USA this July 13-16.  We’ll be announcing specifics of our involvement (whether we have a booth, talks, etc.) closer to the dates.  In the meantime, just know we’ll be there, and would love to chat with any JMP/Cheogram users, prospective customers, or otherwise!

With that, we’ll cap off our 6 years. :)  And what an exciting 6 years it’s been!  With the big launch this year, you can bet on many more to come!

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has an XMPP client. JMP’s tagline, “Freedom for SMS”, captures the freedom that JMP gives you from traditional cell phone carriers, as well as the fully-free nature of all the software that powers JMP (licensed entirely under AGPLv3+).

Today marks one year since JMP launched - at 12:29 UTC (07:29 Eastern Time) on February 15, 2017, the big switch was flipped on https://jmp.chat/ and the site (and service) went live!

When we started, JMP was a bit less featureful - it didn’t use Cheogram (some may recall the uglier catapult.sgx.soprani.ca JIDs), there was no voicemail at all (let alone transcription), and JMP didn’t support outgoing calls or have its own SIP accounts (you needed to provide an existing phone number or SIP address for receiving calls). Since then, we’ve added all these features, and much more. The porting process for bringing your existing number to JMP is streamlined now, we have a much better sense of (and recommendation list for) which XMPP servers and clients work best with JMP, and we support a range of payment options beyond PayPal now, including Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (with more to come!).

You may have noticed that after a year, JMP is still technically in beta. We want to make a few more updates to JMP before we leave beta, particularly in the area of payment options. As an example, a lot of people have asked about the limit on calling minutes that one can use in a month - we’ll be adding ways to get as many minutes as you need, along with many more (and easier) options for keeping your JMP account paid up. We hope to have all of that ready by the end of this year.

Now that you know about JMP’s distant past and future, here are some more recent updates:

• as mentioned last month, several people from JMP will be at LibrePlanet this year, including JMP’s founder (also giving a talk, “Sustainable free software: it needs your business”) - we’ll have a booth and would love to chat if you happen to be around; LibrePlanet is March 24-25 at MIT (in the Boston area): signup at https://libreplanet.org/2018/ today!
• some new commands have been added to JMP/Cheogram (you can access them as you would the Configure Calls command, per https://jmp.chat/#voicemail )
  • Reset SIP Account - if you didn’t write them down or need a refresher, you can get your SIP credentials here (for placing and receiving calls using your JMP number)
  • Display JMP Number - an easier way to see what your JMP number is, in case you forgot
  • Show Monthly Usage (not new, but worth mentioning) - see how many minutes and messages you’ve used in the past 30 days; daily and historical stats coming soon!
• as usual, a variety of bug fixes and minor improvements were added as well; for a complete list, see:
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/jmp-fwdcalls/commits/master
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/jmp-register/commits/master
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/sgx-catapult/commits/master

If you’d like to know what’s happening with JMP between emails like this, here are some ways you can find out:

• follow us on Twitter
• find us in xmpp:discuss@conference.soprani.ca?join - a group chat accessible from most XMPP clients, and on the web
• signup for the 30-day free trial at https://jmp.chat/#signup and try it out!

More updates on where we’re at with payment plans and future feature work will be headed your way next month. As always, we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop on all the new developments.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!