Most of you probably know, and those of you who don’t can easily find out, that RingFree is currently being offered as trial ware: You get to try it out for 30 days, and if you would like to continue, we ask that you pay $30 per year.

Now, none of you have been charged because we haven’t even entered the trial stage. In other words, the 30-day trial has not yet kicked off for those of you have signed up with us, and we haven’t even presented a payment method on our pages.

But over the past week or so that we’ve been in live beta, we’ve gathered enough information to make it possible for us to have a pricing policy that reflects our operational expenses and other potential revenue sources.

That means our pricing will change. Come back and read about it here on Monday, January 28. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised . . . very pleasantly.

When RingFree’s Eric Chamberlain sent the rest of the team his OmniGraffle flow charts describing an on-iPhone registration process for RF that was simple and required a minimum of user keyboard input, we were mostly hooked. Some of us, though, were skeptical: Could the iPhone handle it?

The answer so far has been mostly “Yes”.

Most of you have been able to register with RingFree and able to make phone calls in less than minute. And you’ve told us you really like the process for its simplicity (you also told us we need to shorten some of the explanatory text because you’re not in in the fifth grade — and we will).

But some of you ran into problems. Somewhere in the middle of the process — usually right after phone activation — the registration abruptly ended, and you were left in RingFree limbo: partially registered with no where to go.

When we did come across a solution, we slapped our foreheads because it took so long to figure out the obvious: Those registering with us over WiFi had few problems. But those of you trying to sign-up over AT&T’s EDGE network ran into time-outs and blue-box warnings that killed the process.

The issue is that the iPhone is not able to maintain both a data connection over EDGE and a call connection over GSM concurrently (WiFi and GSM concurrently are OK). So, when you went into the  activation phone call to enter your 4-digit key, you lost data connection with our server and the process would time out. The result: Your iPhone would be activated but you were never registered.

We thought — fingers crossed — we got a handle on the problem. And we deployed javascript modifications that accommodate the momentary loss of data connectivity using EDGE.  Still, some of you, as of early this morning, can’t fully register.

We finally realized that enough of you have been accessing our servers using EDGE that AT&T is caching our data. And until those caches clear and AT&T has our latest javascript in its memory banks,  there’s not much we can do except to ask you who are still facing registration problems to either wait a bit, or to head on down to your local espresso parlor with WiFi and sing up with us there. You’ll be up an running in no time.

P.S.: Using EDGE to make calls through RingFree does not face the same kinds of issues.

The team behind RF.com joked over sandwiches yesterday that the company’s entire marketing budget had been spent on parking near San Francisco’s Moscone Convention center, where the Macworld  Conference and Expo was held earlier this month.

And, though parking in downtown San Francisco is outrageously expensive, it was worth it. We showed off RingFree to a few people. One of those, Ben Wilson of cNet’s  iPhoneAtlas blog, wrote about us and a few other bloggers followed.

Now several hundred of you are using RingFree — stress-testing it, if you will — and we’re learning a lot from your usage patterns, feedback and our fattening log files.

Yesterday was the first time we were able to carve out a few moments to get together face-to-face since Ben’s RingFree “discovery”. We celebrated our initial success for a few minutes. Then we got right back to work.

Yes, too much to do now. We still have to fix the registration process (works fine with WiFi, less fine with Edge and AT&T’s aggressive data caches); and there are many features — and some big changes — to come.

We welcome your comments on this blog, but please, take questions, support requests and feature suggestions to the forum where they are better suited. But do come back to this blog often as this is where we’ll do our best to keep you apprised of the goings-on, the what’s-ups and the why’s-thats.