Since the early/middle of 2007 we’ve been hard at work on a new product. It’s something thousands of our customers will use every day, but not a single one of them will sign up for it or log into it. It’s a silent partner. It’s called Queen Bee.

What is Queen Bee?

Queen Bee is the name of our internal unified billing, admin, and stats platform. Prior to Queen Bee, each one of our pay products had a different sign-up process, a different billing engine, a different coupon engine, a different affiliate engine, and a different back-end admin. That was fine for a while, but last year we decided it was time to take advantage of economies of scale and unify.

How about an example?

Many of our customers have multiple Basecamp accounts. Some may also have a Highrise account or a Campfire account.

So, let’s say you have two Basecamp accounts and a Highrise account and you want to update your credit card because it’s about to expire. Before Queen Bee you’d have to log into each account separately, click the Account tab, click the “change card” tab, and update your card. But now all you have to do is pick any account to update and you’ll see a screen that look like this:

You’ll see that if you have multiple accounts with us on the same credit card you’ll be asked if you want to update all the accounts or just one (or two) of the accounts. This makes our customer’s administrative tasks (updating cards, for example) a lot easier. Hassle be gone.

What else can Queen Bee do?

Queen Bee can do a lot of good stuff, but we’re not completely finished porting all our products over to it yet. We just wanted to give you a quick peek at what we’ve been working on. Stay tuned for another taste of royal jelly as Queen Bee development rolls on.

P.S. Big ups to Jamis for his incredible work on Queen Bee so far. From many different angles it’s been our most complex undertaking to date. So many moving parts, so many criticalities, so many hooks and loops and connections. All things considered, it’s been incredibly smooth sailing. Well done Jamis!