Cloud9 IDE - Your code anytime, anywhere

Not to sound cheap, but the first thing I note is the pricing. It's a little confusing. Does 33 cents per day mean that I'm only charged on days that I use it? So, if I use it Monday - Friday, I'll typically pay 7 Euros per month rather than 10 Euros? Or is it merely saying that it's only 33 cents per day? I'm also unsure what you mean by a workspace. In the UI photos, there's the concept of a "project", but I'm unsure if I would need multiple workspaces.

Then there's the cost itself. If 33 cents per day translates into $166.73 per year (after the conversion to USD), that seems a little expensive. The reason I say that isn't to say that software must be gratis, but that RubyMine's commercial license is only $149 and includes all upgrades for a year and you can upgrade your subscription after that point for just $99 per year. Personal licenses cost even less.

I'm not saying you don't have a great product - it looks absolutely gorgeous. I'm merely asking what the value is here. Is it that I don't have to install my IDE on multiple computers I might use? Is it that it will support multiple languages at the one low price (while JetBrains has different products for different languages)? Is it planned that it will support, say, running and debugging my Rails project without me having to configure environments on different machines?

I'm seriously asking because I do work on multiple machines (of different OSs), but I need to be able to run and debug (in my case Rails) projects and things like Eclipse, TextMate and a terminal, or even gedit with its terminal plugin will allow me to browse my file hierarchy, get an edit space with syntax highlighting, and run my application. Plus, while it can be annoying to set up another box, that doesn't happen very often and it means that things like relying on gems works.

It looks wonderful and I hope you keep improving it!

Thanks for the heads up, we are fixing it right now!

This is based on ACE, which was formerly known as Skywriter, or Mozilla Bespin.

http://ace.ajax.org/

http://c9.io/about.html

Well, the idea is this: Normally you have all your stuff on your own computer. You'll install all the software you need, like your database and runtimes and any SDK. With Cloud9 all that stuff lives in the Cloud. It's hosted and it's accessible for you from anywhere.

So, like any cloud service, the hosting costs money. We are offering this for free when you work on open source projects. But when you are doing a commercial project for a customer and you like the benefits of being in the cloud with not only your editor, but your entire test environment, then you pay something for it. One of the advantages of cloud services is that you have flexibility, so with the pay per day we offer the flexibility to only pay for the use of the platform when you need it. Our thought is that if you're doing a project that makes you a couple of hundred dollars a day, 50 cents for the editor is not much if it saves you a lot of time.

With that said, we still have some way to go before all the time savers we have planned are in Cloud9. We're working on a very cool Git UI, great deployment integration and many many other features. More important for you is the Ruby support that is upcoming, including step through debugging. In the mean time use cloud9 for your open source projects and see how it feels for you.