In addition to the questions here, be sure to look at our best practices page, where you can find lots of details about how to use Chirp.

How big can my team be?

As small as one person (yourself), and as big as you want. There is no built-in limit on team size.

How many projects can I have?

As many as you want, and the number of projects does not affect your price. Chirp is priced per-user, not per-project.

I want to work with people outside my company.
Do they need to buy Chirp?

Not necessarily. You can have tasks in projects where your team includes people outside your company. These external users must download and use Chirp in order to work with these tasks and projects. However, like you, they get a free trial license for 30 days. After a trial license is expired, people can continue to use Chirp, but with some functional limitations: They cannot create new tasks, or new views. However, they can still update the team by creating new status entries for already-existing tasks, and sync with the server to keep abreast of progress by others.

So as long as team members with paid Chirp licenses are willing to create all the new tasks, users with expires trial licenses can still participate in projects “for free.”

Is my data secure?

As a provider of a commercial, web-based service, our approach to answering this question must balance the degree of information we share about our security infrastructure with our ability to actually secure your data. We need to share enough with you for you to be comfortable that we have addressed security concerns, but not share so much detail that we end up reducing the security of your data.

In that light, here are the things you should know, and we hope you find them useful.

1. Client PC data storage for full-time access. Chirp stores your project information on your computer, and then periodically synchronizes it with a database on our servers – if you are connected to the Internet – in order to transfer it to your team members. This insures you will always have access to your data - whether our service is reachable or not.
2. Secure internet communications. All communications between your computer and our server are encrypted, and transmitted using HTTPS. (This is the same communication method used when your browser is performing "secure" communications - e.g. showing the key/lock indicating a secure page.)
3. Multiple identity verification techniques used. During data synchronization with the server, Chirp uses a multi-stage technique to verify that the user is actually who they say they are in order to provider high authentication and authorization levels, and protection against user impersonation-style attacks.
4. Encrypted data. Key elements of user data are stored on our servers in encrypted form. For instance, all financial data from our online ecommerce store is stored in encrypted form.
5. Partitioned data. Our Internet-based sync servers use various techniques to partition your task data in order to create "layers" of protection, such that possession of a little bit of data does not automatically lead to possession of all data. While this sounds a little obscure, layering is a key strategy for strong security.
6. Customer-driven access control. You have control over which of your team members see your data. (You control this by inclusion / exclusion of users from your project team.)

Note that Plum Canary personnel do have some limited access to your project data. There are two circumstances in which we require this access:

• Legitimate demands from authorized law enforcement; and
• Customer support diagnostics. However, our corporate policies are that no support person is permitted to access customer project data without explicit prior permission from the customer.

Also, like the data itself, our administrative interfaces are layered, and not all data is available from every interface, which provides us a second method to keep your content secure from personnel at Plum Canary not authorized to access it.

Like any commercial Internet-based service, we use care in creating a trustworthy service for you to use. We strive to make our servers more secure than the email servers you normally use for your business email correspondence.

However, we cannot absolutely guarantee the security of your data from all possible risks. If you feel uncomfortable allowing your data to be stored on a well-attended and well-designed commercial Internet-based service, you should either not use our service, or limit the type of information you include in the data you store in Chirp.