I wanted to give you a heads-up about something we're announcing shortly: We're no longer offering Blogger Pro as a separate product and we're folding most of the features into regular (free) Blogger.

It's sad but true. (Except it's not really that sad.)

Don't worry - nothing you paid for is going away. And while you won't be charged, your subscription is still valid. You will continue to have access to features like RSS and post-via-email that are still not in the free version. You'll also have priority support from our expanded team and new support system.

More importantly, I want to stress that we couldn't have gotten to where we are today without you. Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium. We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on. So we built new things that would appeal to some Blogger users (namely, you).

Thanks to supportive people like yourself, this plan allowed us to grow and build a better service -- and, eventually, get us to much more stable ground. We're eternally grateful, and I hope you were happy with the relationship, as well.

Today, as you may know, Blogger's situation is much different. For one thing, we're part of Google. (If you missed that announcement, check the FAQ. Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web.

This is a good thing.

So we're in the fortunate position of being able to give back to our users. Specifically, we want give all of you who paid for Pro, a Blogger hoodie as a way of saying thanks. Just go to sweatshirt.pyra by October 1, 2003 to claim yours.