Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately GitHub's OAuth API doesn't let us get read access to private repos without also having write access. http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes We would like to make write access optional later on for users who only need to deploy public repos. I'm not sure if this is actually possible or not though. It'd be great if GitHub added more authentication options.
Could you elaborate here about your product and what it does, in detail? That would get me to sign up. :)
The deploy process:
* Turns on maintenance mode
* Does a backup of your database using pgbackups (support for others later)
* Pushes your code to Heroku
* Runs migrations
* Turns off maintenance mode
* Sends you an email to notify you of success or failure
In the future we would like to add support for a bunch more features including provisioning new Heroku instances and showing you the commits that will be pushed. We want to become the place to do managed deployment to Heroku. It's to easy to forget to do a backup or forget to turn on maintenance mode when deploying manually. At our day job, we have 10s of Heroku instances and being able to see the status of multiple deploys at once is going to be a major win for us.