Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

duetapp.com

161–170 of 203 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#161
post #120

Fellow CodeCanyon seller. Take your app from CodeCanyon, and try to reach the entreprise market. Price your product in this way: - single user: $79 ($49 for updates) - agency/small business: $299 (+ $129) + $199 for optional install That's a pretty simple pricing, and it'll make you 1,000 time more sane than putting it on CodeCanyon and fighting with dads and moms trying to setup this on their shared host with a thou…

I am currently also selling my product (newsletter mailer) via codecanyon. My main concern leaving codecanyon is how to drive potential customers to my site. As you already said there is a huge support effort on codecanyon, due to "inexperienced" customers.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#162
post #154

XSS vulnerabilities all over the place. No validation performed at all? Example; http://www.duetapp.com/demo/#projects/3/tasks/30

Hmm. There is definitely a lots of validation on both the client and server. The demo refreshes every 30 mins so I'm not able to see what you're referring to. Can you shoot me an email with the issue you're referring to and I'll look into it asap. Thanks.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#163
post #154

XSS vulnerabilities all over the place. No validation performed at all? Example; http://www.duetapp.com/demo/#projects/3/tasks/30

OP, if you can address this, I'll probably buy. How are tax rates configured? I didn't see anything about it in the admin demo.

The tax rate is set in the config file.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#164
Very impressive. Just my 2 cents:

It would be great if there was some sort of auto invoice (it seems you have to enter the time details in manually)

The calendar seems to always require scrolling down, it would be great if it fitted in the view

Also, mobile support if its not there, for iPad at least with a home icon

And agree with other posters here, a timer that work across page refreshes and overall calendar showing all tasks / deadlines for all projects would be awesome.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#165
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this and I like the idea of building the software to run on Heroku (or similar). For those that want a self hosted plan you just tell them where to host it and if they want installation outside of that you charge them a decent hourly rate to make it worth it.

That only half solves the problem. A lot of shops that want self-hosted literally want to host it themselves, to keep data in their datacenters. if you built something deployable to EC2, you could make sure it works on a local Eucalyptus/OpenStack deployment or something. Or you could try to build for OpenShift and tell clients them have to have their own OpenShift cloud. But there's no real easy solution.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport/

You can export the VM from EC2.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#167
post #119

A working Demo link in codecanyon: http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-management/full_scre... Here is the codecanyon page for the same project: http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-management/4613916 Customer reviews and comments: http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-management/discussio... + Feedback: 1. I did not find any word on -- updates, documentation, support or future upgrades from the developer. T…

Hi. I just updated the pricing page to address most of the points in #1. It would be impossible for me to offer a trial since this software needs to be hosted on your own server. There's no lock in. It's on your own server so you have full access to the mysql database with all of the info.

Hmm, I'd consider setting up an EC2 image with this pre-installed. You can spin up copies for people that want to try it out with their own data (you'd run the server, charge them a nominal fee, and they'd get a full inspection of the system). When they choose to buy, you give them a copy of their image. They can run it on amazon, or export the VM to run on any machine they like. Or, they can install the software and drop-in the database images from the VM.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I was selling a PHP+MySQL script and about 20% of my customers couldn't install it despite my verbose instructions. I don't really blame them, I shouldn't have been making non-technical web masters navigate a cPanel account and mess with PHP in the first place. I couldn't possibly provide personal technical support to everyone in need so I granted a refund to anyone who didn't get it working. As a side not…

We have a vendor of some mailing list software that you install your save (basically a tarball of php code). If we have an issue with it, they basically refuse to help unless we give them ssh access to our server. Stupidly we have this mailing list software running on our production web server (the same one our customers use to access our apps), so we can't do that. I mean I trust the guy to not go in an install a ba…

I recommend using acct to monitor the server in addition to limiting the vendor's user. If something happened, you would have a very clear picture of all users' actions in addition to some statistics about system health.

Re: Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo

#170
I'll probably get buried but, here's what I'm going to suggest. Don't deviate from the price too much. I'll tell you why. You're competing with pancakeapp, buggenie, bugify, redmine, bugkick, mantis, Zoho (on some level) and many more, including some of the cheaper hosted basecamp clones. And I'm already considering buying yours. Your pricing is great. And I appreciate what you're doing.

I wouldn't go more than $69 or $79 if you raise your prices at all. If you have future build plans you can always charge for the next version upgrade or specific enhancements. If you want this to be the product you work on and support, try to charge what you can to sustain yourself and grow, but you're going to turn off a bunch of freelancers at some $295 price point that people are suggesting on HN. Somebody said, "for businesses of any size the difference between $250 and $45 is negligible." Um no, These same people (thousands of comments worth) are royally pissed about the Adobe Cloud pricing and are looking for alternatives.

I wouldn't even consider it at $295 price and many others wouldn't either. Why? Because I can get a proven system for many months or permanently at that rate. And for the FOSS ones, I might even become a contributor or leverage the community for enhancements or plugins in those cases.

HN is full of people trying to charge more and a ton of them are going to fail or become irrelevant. Basically your product is for freelancers, not enterprise. That's a fact, luck of the draw, however you want to look at it. Enterprise might trickle in after enough freelancers are rocking your system. Enterprise use Mantis, and that's free. Why should they be turned off by a low price. You might even find small businesses you didn't think of using you product that will be more attracted to your price. There are other things you can do, like try to get bundled with something else, or offer installation service at a rate.

Sell it on your own if you can using Stripe or some other managed provider that isn't taking so much of a cut. Or don't sell it exclusively on codecanyon. you should be making the majority of the money, a lot more than half.

Post reply on HN