You seem to be heavily focussed on Github's financial costs, but why should I use this over something like Bitbucket, which provides free hosting for small teams and very reasonable pricing for teams?
In a financial standpoint, once you hit over 5 users on BitBucket, you're paying $1/user/month. With Legit Teams, you only pay for space and are not limited on either collaborators or repositories. And for me personally, the 500 MB plan is more space than I'll ever need, as only the size of my compressed .git folders count.
As the owner of a small non-profit with real turnover, I would much rather use something like this.. just my two cents. We've had issues with holdover accounts costing us even after our developers are no longer actively involved. It makes a lot more sense to charge based on storage space.
It's undeniably an awesome deal and I really like the website design.
I get a little concerned about the business model. Almost to the point that it would prevent me from hosting my code with them for fear of them going out of business or raising their prices later.
The current git repo for the commercial product I work on is 850MB. This is millions of lines of code + 8-9 years of development (migrated from svn at some point). That means we could be happy at the $5 month range.
If you get 1000 customers X $5, you're making $5000/month. I make way more than that as an employee.
Of course, you have people that will need more than 2GB but I think it's rare.
tl;dr raise your prices. I think it will help you get more business.
We created Legit Teams because we ourselves needed a service like it. As such, we don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. In turn, making enough money to simply handle our costs is really enough for us to keep this going.
tl;dr We're not raising prices or shutting Legit Teams down because it's not a business, but a tool that we use, and will keep using. Having others on board is a bonus! :)
What happens when you become large enough to justify an organization account at GitHub and it no longer becomes beneficial for you to either use or continue to operate Legit Teams?
I think the question was directed at the founders, not the users. What happens to the users of the service when the founders no longer have any use for it?
We've put a lot of work into our system so far; I don't want or plan to switch over to GitHub for my private projects anytime in the prospective future.
My co-founder and I run under the philosophy that we create tools that we ourselves use. Legit Teams is no exception; we believe in the service and have no plans of discontinuing it.
There are 30 developers on the project I work on. So if you get 1000 customers just like us. You're making $5000/month to handle the load of 30,000 daily users. Chances are you'll have to handle support too.
Not sure if we're typical or how much load 30,000 users would generate. Personally, I pull/push at least once a day. Just something for you to keep in mind.
I see your point. There's little I can say about handling 30,000 daily users along with support, though; what this really entails will only be determined by time if we get to that stage.
We're a small business with 20+ repositories and faced this problem long ago. GitHub pricing simply isn't tailored for small projects. We moved to SpringLoops which only charges for "active" projects, so we can close those projects that only get opened for an occasional fix/compile. I really miss GitHub and all the new features, but can't complain for the price.
So far, I loved the very polished interface and the reasonable pricing (this coming from a RepositoryHosting costumer). I'll push some code to try out. Congrats and good luck!
2GB of space isn't all that much. That's the free plan assembla offers. We blew through it with a year of general disciplined use but every once in a while we dropped a DLL or game asset in and so the 3 people generated 2GB of git in a year. While it's possible to get rid of such assets from history permanently its complex and risks other data loss if you're not extremely cautious.
Just feedback to say that arranging for custom plans at 2GB seems low.
Just curious - how are you planning to address the problem of ssh key lookup at scale ? Github hacked its own PAM module to read from MySQL, if I'm not wrong.
As far as I can tell, GitHub uses one git user to grant repository access to everyone. This introduces SSH key lookup problems because all GitHub members need to be authorized under this one user.
Legit Teams, by contrast, allocates an individual user per member who signs up. Thus, SSH key lookups are limited to only the keys that one person has. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this circumvents the scaling issue entirely.
Competing on price - this is very low margin, even with negligible storage and bandwidth costs - when GitHub is already in the "dollar per repo" range seems like a good idea until you realize that your target market (poor students) might not want to give you anything.
I strongly recommend that you read the first of the Copy Hacks books: the one on messaging. Key is the insights on identifying the motivations of your users.
Just created a test account. Pretty slick for a side project. Love the TODO list feature. Like others have mentioned i too worry about the pricing though. I have several people pushing each day and pulls from multiple servers as i deploy straight from the git repo. Slow pushes are the worst and at this price range i dont see you guys making that work once people really start using your product.
I think it actually looks better than bitbucket which some have mentioned which to me looks really cluttered.
I am not a student though so maybe i should not be looking at this as an option for a business anyway, but still...
I can't foresee all scaling issues that may come to pass; for what it's worth, I can tell you that I have trust in the people behind Legit Teams to solve these problems.
In turn, I can only ask for you to try our service and see if pushing becomes a problem. I'd then love to hear your feedback via our contact page based on your experience.
Immediately, the opening paragraph states that this service would be useful to "college students." However, Bitbucket offers their full unlimited package to college students with a .edu account, and this account lasts for a lifetime, even after graduation. Perhaps you could offer this deal to college students as well.
This is great. As a freelancer, I often reluctant to delete past client's repo. With this, I can keep all past projects' repo without blowing my wallet.
Edit: It would be great if they add support for DSA too.
32 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 82.7 ms ] threadBut I think evanbarter's question is valid: why this over BitBucket? Any compelling reasons...
I get a little concerned about the business model. Almost to the point that it would prevent me from hosting my code with them for fear of them going out of business or raising their prices later.
The current git repo for the commercial product I work on is 850MB. This is millions of lines of code + 8-9 years of development (migrated from svn at some point). That means we could be happy at the $5 month range.
If you get 1000 customers X $5, you're making $5000/month. I make way more than that as an employee.
Of course, you have people that will need more than 2GB but I think it's rare.
tl;dr raise your prices. I think it will help you get more business.
tl;dr We're not raising prices or shutting Legit Teams down because it's not a business, but a tool that we use, and will keep using. Having others on board is a bonus! :)
My co-founder and I run under the philosophy that we create tools that we ourselves use. Legit Teams is no exception; we believe in the service and have no plans of discontinuing it.
Not sure if we're typical or how much load 30,000 users would generate. Personally, I pull/push at least once a day. Just something for you to keep in mind.
Thank you for your thoughts.
There's no way I'm going through the hassle of expensing $5 a month, but $60 for a years service isn't going to raise any queries with finance.
Just feedback to say that arranging for custom plans at 2GB seems low.
https://bitbucket.org/plans/
Legit Teams, by contrast, allocates an individual user per member who signs up. Thus, SSH key lookups are limited to only the keys that one person has. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this circumvents the scaling issue entirely.
I strongly recommend that you read the first of the Copy Hacks books: the one on messaging. Key is the insights on identifying the motivations of your users.
Best of luck!
Sorry for the delay!
I think it actually looks better than bitbucket which some have mentioned which to me looks really cluttered.
I am not a student though so maybe i should not be looking at this as an option for a business anyway, but still...
I can't foresee all scaling issues that may come to pass; for what it's worth, I can tell you that I have trust in the people behind Legit Teams to solve these problems.
In turn, I can only ask for you to try our service and see if pushing becomes a problem. I'd then love to hear your feedback via our contact page based on your experience.
https://codeplane.com/
Edit: It would be great if they add support for DSA too.