Changes to the subscription plans for 2020 and beyond

I started AstroBin in 2010, with the vision of providing the astrophotography community with an image hosting and social networking platform that was modern, intuitive, and pleasant to use.

In 2016, after five years online and having struggled to find the financial means to support this increasingly expensive endeavor, I introduced paid subscriptions. I tried donations and ads at first, but unfortunately, they alone were not enough to support AstroBin.

Starting from 2020, after having poured most of my free time into AstroBin for the past ten years (an estimated 4,000 - 5,000 hours), I want to pursue the dream of making AstroBin my full-time job.

Currently, due to my day job obligations and parental duties as a father of two, I get to dedicate 5-10 hours a week on AstroBin (which might be 0 on a bad week, and 15 on a good week. It tends to ebb and flow, to be honest, depending on my energy level and external factors). Truth be told, AstroBin is quite a large project to be handled by a lone individual in their spare time, and obviously I need to compromise a lot with what gets done and how it gets done.

I have recently run a survey amongst some of the current Lite and Premium subscribers, asking if they were willing to contribute more, financially, in order to make this dream a reality.

85% of the respondents said yes.

What are the changes?

1. There are now three subscription tiers on AstroBin: Lite, Premium, and Ultimate.

2. The prices, in Swiss Francs (I live in Switzerland and this avoids PayPal conversion fees) are, respectively: CHF 20, CHF 40, and CHF 60. At the time of writing, CHF 1 = $ 1.03 USD.

3. The new Free remains limited to 10 uploads, but they are now restricted to 25 MB each. It loses access to image revisions, plate-solving, groups, and IOTD/TP participation. Additionally, advanced search filters are not available, but it's still possible to search by any number of keywords. Visitors without an account, or members with a Free account cannot view the full-resolution images unless the author of the image is on the Ultimate subscription. However, they can access the large version of the image that is 1824 pixels wide.

4. The new Lite get a maximum of 50 total images, 25 MB each. It gets non-intrusive, hand-picked astronomy ads from AstroBin's partners.

5. The new Premium is not much different than before, for most people. I felt bad about crippling it, so I didn't. However, I set a limit of 50 MB per image. Should be plenty for most.

6. The new Ultimate gets some major new features. As a subscriber to AstroBin Ultimate, this is what you get:

   1. Visitors to your page, whether or not they are members or subscribers, won't see ads near your images. This way your pages are always clean.

   2. You get the new and shiny advanced plate-solving feature, powered by PixInsight, that shows more objects than the standard one, including planets and a growing catalogue of solar system objects. Learn more and look at the amazing example below!.

   3. You get the ability to associate an uncompressed source image to each of your image. This would be the full size, full color-depth, file that came out of your image processing software. The accepted formats are XISF/FITS/TIFF/PSD. You can store this file on AstroBin for safe keeping.

   4. You get a “Trash” section and ability to undelete images.

   5. You get the ability to download all your data off AstroBin (full resolution images that you uploaded, including revisions, with all attached data). This feature is also available to AstroBin Premium subscribers.

   6. Plus, as the name “Ultimate” suggests, everything new to ever come to AstroBin goes into this subscription. No “Ultimate Plus Pro” in the future, take my word on it.

NGC 7000 Mosaic, by Sigga

Plate-solved on AstroBin with PixInsight.

For more details and a clearer overview, please visit the subscriptions page.

What happens to the current subscribers?

• Current Lite and Premium subscriptions will continue to work as before until expiration.

• Current Lite and Premium subscribers who have a recurring subscription will continue to work as before indefinitely, or at least until they cancel their subscription.

Voluntary donations

Many of you, in the survey that I mentioned, said that they would be willing to make a small monthly donation on top of their subscription, to help AstroBin achieve financial independence. I think it's not hard to understand that if I can go from working 5-10 hours/week to 40 hours/week, the benefits will be there for everyone in this community.

For this reason, I'm also setting up a donation mechanism. You can read more, and subscribe, on this page.

Conclusion

I'm hoping you all will support me in this. Those who even marginally know me, know that AstroBin is not a “money grab”. I don't know who in their right mind would work on a project nights and weekends, for ten years, without an intrinsic motivation, without it being a labor of love. A site like AstroBin cannot be the next Instagram, for the obvious reason of astrophotography being a niche hobby. I'm just hoping, with your support, that I can take AstroBin to the next level.

Thank you for allowing me to enrich the amateur astrophotography hobby and community with this platform!

Addendum

Obviously, I wrote this page before the data loss of February 15th, 2020, of which everyone must be aware at this time. This page mentions the safe keeping of your data. As I have written on many more places, including the FAQ, AstroBin is not officially a backup service. I do my best to preserve your data, but on February 15th an unfortunate series of events led to the loss of a some files.

I did not delete the mentions of “safe keeping” from this page, because thanks to the hard lessons learned on that day, AstroBin is now, after 10 years of activity, safer than ever.

Salvatore