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Is Kiln from Fog Creek dead, dying, or what?

11 points by aeorgnoieang ↗ HN
I use Kiln at work and I have (had) my own personal account; both connected to FogBugz.

I just got an email from Fog Creek stating that they were no longer going to be offering Kiln for free. Previously Kiln (and FogBugz) were available for free for accounts with up-to two active users. The email states that Kiln accounts will need to be upgraded to a paid subscription plan by May 1st.

Very annoyingly, when I tried to access my Kiln account last night, so I could download all of my repos, I discovered that my Kiln account had been disabled. I probably have all of those repos on one of my computers, but maybe now I'll never really know.

I checked Fog Creek's site and Kiln isn't mentioned or listed anywhere I could find.

Is Kiln being rolled into FogBugz? Is it going to be killed off completely?

I've generally enjoyed Kiln tho it has had pretty consistent performance problems over the past few years (that I notice mostly in FogBugz when it tries to list commits related to a 'case').

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] thread
kevinherron
We were using FogBugz+Kiln on premise for a while but abandoned Kiln for GitHub Enterprise a year or so back.

Seems dead to me, and to be honest, it always kind of sucked and was slow.

anildash
Hey! Sorry we haven't communicated well about this (that's my fault, I'm the new-ish CEO at Fog Creek). I'll write a full blog post about this, but here's the story:

* We are moving to a paid model for Kiln overall; it's gotten a bit more expensive to run the service, especially as it's the last real Mercurial host, and we wanted to do right by our paying customers.

* While getting ready for the transition, we screwed up with a few users in handling people who got free Kiln accounts with FogBugz. It sounds like you fall into that group, and you should have heard from our support team with an update to correct this. I'm sorry we got it wrong and we'll make sure you get access back if that's the case.

* We are thinking through how to better explain the way our tools like FogBugz and Kiln work together, so we've started marketing Kiln as "Dev Hub" because it's easier for people to understand if they're familiar with other version control tools.

We aren't going to kill of Kiln, what we're working to do right now is make sure it's a stable and sustainable business, and then based on what our customers tell us, we'll be deciding how much to invest in modernizing and expanding the platform.

Sorry that we didn't clearly communicate this in advance — I'll make sure that doesn't happen again for these kinds of changes.

stephenr
> last real Mercurial host,

I'm pretty sure the bitbucket team would disagree there.

aeorgnoieang
Thanks for the reply!

Your support team definitely helped me out and restored (my access to) my account.

dpeterson
I have been using Kiln for free for quite a few years for my personal git repos. I still haven't grown past just me. I received an e-mail last week saying they will start charging $20 dollars a month, no exceptions, to keep Kiln. I just ran into a Kiln bug due to a change in Openshift. Kiln does not support clones with --depth=1 --recursive and a username and password in the url with escaped characters like %40 in place of the @ symbol. It seems I have been given a motivating reason to leave Kiln at just the right time. Gitlab hosts free unlimited private repos for people like me and they support the url structure I need. It seems hard to justify them charging $20 dollars minimum for how I use it. They no longer have a business model that will bring on new users; I think they are only interested in maintaining the large clients temporarily stuck on Kiln.