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Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

blog.assembla.com

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Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#41

Post by Loic »

lenart wrote: post #27
ovidiu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good reason not to use assembla ever again. The same thing happened to me.

I "complained" on their blog and got a fair response from their team. Here's what they said: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/12217/... To summarize: they didn't have a sustainable business plan and when the costs got too bit they canceled free service. They say now that they're better prepared. Maybe they're worth giving another try?

This is why on Indefero I offer only a limited space free account (still with your own domain). The percentage of people using for free such large offers is too high. This is because you are dealing with people who know how to integrate with different services (googlegroups, wikispace, sourceforge, etc.) and can get a really nice setup for free.

From a business point of view, I definitely prefer to have less visibility but a higher percentage of paid customers. This allows me to create a product which is of high quality on the long term because I have money to do so. And in fact, discussing with my customers, they prefer it that way.

Note that the free offer of Assembla is not free, you get direct advertising when accessing your space.

But if we do small maths and we consider that Assembla has the incredible 5% conversion rate from free to paid. This means that on average they will have for 100 users:

95 x 1GB of "free data" 5 x $49 x 2.5GB of paid data

I take the 50% usage as on the long run it what my personal stats gives me.

So about 100GB of data for $245 per month. As you need a triple backup to be robust. It means 300GB of data to maintain for $245 per month.

It is possible, but the margin will be razor thin if you want to provide quality. It is a bold move, I am eager to see how it develops.

Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#42

Post by tuxychandru »

sandGorgon wrote: post #18

is there any good non-commandline way of using git on windows osx and linux ? SmartGit comes to mind, but what are you guys using ?

The only case I generally need a GUI tool is for diff and merge. Meld handles it very well for me on Linux and git supports it by default.

Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#43

Post by j_baker »

Loic wrote: post #41
lenart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "complained" on their blog and got a fair response from their team. Here's what they said: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/12217/... To summarize: they didn't have a sustainable business plan and when the costs got too bit they canceled free service. They say now that they're better prepared. Maybe they're worth giving another try?

This is why on Indefero I offer only a limited space free account (still with your own domain). The percentage of people using for free such large offers is too high. This is because you are dealing with people who know how to integrate with different services (googlegroups, wikispace, sourceforge, etc.) and can get a really nice setup for free. From a business point of view, I definitely prefer to have less visibili…

On the other hand, you offer an open-source version (which is great by the way), so it's not really a huge deal if the free version isn't that great.

Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#44

Post by Loic »

j_baker wrote: post #43
Loic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why on Indefero I offer only a limited space free account (still with your own domain). The percentage of people using for free such large offers is too high. This is because you are dealing with people who know how to integrate with different services (googlegroups, wikispace, sourceforge, etc.) and can get a really nice setup for free. From a business point of view, I definitely prefer to have less visibili…

On the other hand, you offer an open-source version (which is great by the way), so it's not really a huge deal if the free version isn't that great.

Thanks for the nice comment! You are right, but this is not because of marketing grounds, this is because I would personally never use a software as as a service for my code/projects where I cannot move out of it without losing my data and workflow.

This is another subject, but for a critical part of my business, I want to always have full control over my data and workflow. By allowing people even with the free account to have their own domain and a full backup compatible with the open source (GPL) version, my customers can migrate out without even having their users noticing the change. This is my idea of freedom for SaaS.

Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#46

Post by icefox »

pjhyett wrote: post #30
andysingleton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Assembla, but I will say that Github is a good service, and they do a better job with code sharing and individual repositories. Assembla is more oriented toward managing teams. This is not a move to go against Github. We still offer Github as a repository tool. You can use Assembla ticketing / collaboration / team management tools, and link them to code commits on github.

Thanks for the kind words. GitHub does have an organization/teams feature currently in beta and should be released publicly within a month or two.

Interesting, given that GitHub is several years old and has a huge user base there must be something right for GitHub to have not needed a teams feature up until now. Was this a feature that users were asking for or a feature that when watching users they would very much benefit to have?

Re: Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

#47

Post by pjhyett »

icefox wrote: post #46
pjhyett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words. GitHub does have an organization/teams feature currently in beta and should be released publicly within a month or two.

Interesting, given that GitHub is several years old and has a huge user base there must be something right for GitHub to have not needed a teams feature up until now. Was this a feature that users were asking for or a feature that when watching users they would very much benefit to have?

We just turned two and folks have been asking for team support since before we launched. We've never been in the habit of building features we merely think people want.
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