This is the most important message you have received since you joined the Homestead community, so I ask that you please take a few minutes to read it carefully and fill out the attached feedback form.

I am disheartened when companies fail to communicate directly with their customers about major changes in their business. Therefore, I want to tell you personally about an important change we are making: we will soon be asking you to pay for your current version of Homestead Personal.

I know that Homestead could never have gone from an idea in my living room to a vibrant community of millions without your amazing support. In this spirit, we are asking for your feedback before we set the price -- more about this in a minute.

We will still have a free version
You will still be able to build and maintain a site for free, with a new service called Homestead Personal Preview. Sites built with the Preview version will be restricted to: three pages, limited customer support, 8 MB of storage space, no use of the offline SiteBuilder, and no option to remove Homestead branding.

Why are we charging?
Based on our recent success with Homestead Professional, we are convinced that subscription is a vastly superior way to keep Homestead Personal an innovative, world-class service for years to come. Due to the collapse of the sponsorship market, free Internet services are becoming impossible to sustain unless they are severely restricted or neglected. We refuse to let Homestead Personal become a second-rate service.

Homestead Personal will be better than ever!
Here are a few improvements you will see initially with the new Homestead Personal: a brand new version of our popular offline SiteBuilder, an option for removing Homestead branding from your pages, a new graphics library of more than 800,000 images, 25 MB of storage space, and priority turnaround time on e-mail requests. Best of all, we will be able to add advanced features to Homestead Personal that we have been unable to justify with a free service.

When will this happen?
These changes will go into effect in about a month. However, current Homestead Personal members, like you, will have an additional 60-day grace period to choose between paying for the new Homestead Personal or downgrading to the Preview version.

How much will it cost?
Here is where I will need your help. I want to make sure we charge existing members a fair price for Homestead Personal. We estimate that we will need to charge new members about ten dollars per month to cover our costs. However, if a high percentage of you indicate interest, we can offer existing members a meaningful discount. Thus, your feedback on the attached form is essential to ensuring the lowest price possible for everybody in the Homestead Personal community.

We will take the next week to read and incorporate all of your feedback. At the end of June we will send you an update with final pricing and timing.

Finally, thank you for being such an integral part of the Homestead community, and for your incredible support over the years. On behalf of the entire Homestead team, I look forward to serving you as we continue to realize our vision of bringing the power of the Internet to everyone.