Your price points are all wrong. No one cares about the difference between $3 and $6. In 2012 dollars, we're talking penny candy.
A single price point would be less confusing, but I don't really understand the appeal. Anyone who doesn't trust github and/or needs that level of secrecy will be willing to shell out the $10 a month for a dedicated instance that they can install git on themselves.
In short, I don't think you can be competitive with github because I think the frictional market you're trying to target doesn't exist in the capacity that you would like to think it does.
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the niche, but the reasons you listed to enter aren't very good (namely, too expensive for lots of small projects) as BitBucket solves that problem.
That's exactly what I thought. 2 paragraphs in I was expecting a Bitbucket mention and a reason why it didn't work for them and found none. Search the page and there's no mention of it at all. Then I wrote the article off as an uninformed rant.
Dropbox does have a limited form of version control fwiw. Select a file on the website and there's a "Previous Versions" item highlighted.
Not that I'm recommending this approach. That side, I do have GitHub repos that are also in my Dropbox, so I can collaborate with non-technical folk. It works great and haven't had a single issue with it in about 6 months of usage.
1. As others have said: BitBucket.com. Every time these guys are on here promoting this service they act like they've never heard of it. But they're in this space? Doesn't make sense.
2. I don't know how good I feel trusting my source code to a sorta-startup run by a small group of fulltime students. I don't think you should quit school to run this startup, but I do think this is an awfully serious service to try to offer in your spare time.
Yes, it's a developers job to ensure that he has backups -- and Git repos lend themselves to this very well. But that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to treat your user's code as if they have no other copies and no other backups.
3. Your post about why the world needs another Git hosting service just explains why you think Github isn't the right fit. It doesn't really make your case.
4. When you're talking to engineers and you write this big setup paragraph about how much work it was just to share a git repo, and all of us are familiar with the myriad of hosting options, it just makes you look like you either don't know about your competition or you're hoping we don't. Not an effective strategy.
5. Github will give free repo's to students. And if you're not a student and you want a private repo paying a small amount for it is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. My code is valuable to me. I want to pay you a fair sum for a fair service.
I don't think you should quit what you're doing if you're having fun, learning, and believe in your idea. But GitHub is a huge brand with a ton of goodwill from the community. BitBucket is own by Atlassian which generally makes great things. Both have fantastic GUI's for Windows & Mac and great websites. So far I haven't heard anything that differentiates you. Don't treat me like I'm dumb, just show me why you're better.
1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work. As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.
2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to apply such a generalization to all students.
3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across succinctly.
4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why we created Legit Teams—they were the context.
5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when developing with others.
It's not that I feel (or said) that "college students can't be trusted." But I don't want to have to worry about changing my project hosting if you guys decide to call it quits. I add webhooks, hard-code remote URLs into automation scripts, etc. I think you have a barrier of seriousness and longevity to overcome before I'd "invest" my time on your platform. And yes, I think it's a little higher because you're still students.
You could probably overcome that by going the balsamiq route and showing a consistently growing, profitable business. It's not an accident that it's normal to announce funding rounds in a press release: being able to associate yourselves with either massive profits or trusted brand name investors gives you credibility that being a couple guys with a good looking landing page doesn't.
I hope you take this all in a constructive way and know that I, and most other people in our industry, applaud you for shipping.
> 1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the
> number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work.
> As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our
> own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.
Bitbucket provides free, unlimited hosting for students. There's no limit on the number of collaborators. All you have to do is validate your university email address and you'll go from 5 users for free to the unlimited educational plan.
You should always ask yourself, why the code you are going to write should not be open source? It's only true for paid projects and may startup prototypes. Paid projects should be not problem because they are paid. That leaves the startup ideas.
I'll take a stab at this since I signed up for bitbucket after reading the comments:
I have a lot of code. A LOT. It's mostly random things around data to make tracking things in my life easier (diet being the most recent one). And most of the code is crap in two ways: (1) I'd never want to be associated with it in a public sense and (2) It's so specialized to my life that it's unlikely that anyone would use it or contribute to it. Sure, there might be a few hundred people in the world that could find it useful, but those few hundred are unlikely to happen upon my kludged-up solution, and if they are, I'd feel badly when it doesn't work for them the way it works for me due to my personal configuration being hard coded throughout.
I want my code stored in a safe place that sees regular backups in case of disk failure, or I'd throw it on my own VPS. Your service's website does not provide any information addressing security.
I set this up at my university to see if it would be a good solution for school-related project hosting. Haven't rolled out (yet), but as you said it's very promising.
Gitlab team is making great software - basicaly they've copied what's best in Github and released it to the world allowing you to set up your own git hosting service (accessible only by your team). In my opinion it's great piece of software as long, as you don't want to share your code with anyone out there (beside your teammates). Ergo - it's better imo for students, as long, as they have machine that will be able to host it (VPS basically).
For the segment of people you're targeting, there is very little difference between $3 and $6 a month, let alone $3, $4, $5, and $6 a month. We're talking portions of a Starbucks coffee here.
I'd focus on why you're different than the (already loved and highly used) existing options out there. Then I'd think about revamping the pricing to have each plan be more differentiated.
If your team is small enough then BitBucket is a great option for closed-source projects. The only difference is the lack of GitHub's interface and neat features like graphs. I wasn't too impressed with the code-review features for pull requests, but I don't remember GitHub being significantly better either.
When I was in College (just graduated a few months ago), GitHub applied a $7 coupon to my account, which covers a micro account. All I did was ask about student pricing. They should probably offer an educational discount with .edu email verification.
A totally different way to think about this post, is that the guy who has posted this post is a bitbucket fan or a clever promoter, so he has listed every point that makes BitBucket differ from Github and is the reason, why it is loved by a lot of guys out there.
If I am correct in my guess, then I really think its a great marketing strategy, and if not then BitBucket guys should really think of marketing in this way.
48 comments
[ 68.9 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadA single price point would be less confusing, but I don't really understand the appeal. Anyone who doesn't trust github and/or needs that level of secrecy will be willing to shell out the $10 a month for a dedicated instance that they can install git on themselves.
In short, I don't think you can be competitive with github because I think the frictional market you're trying to target doesn't exist in the capacity that you would like to think it does.
Gitblit? http://gitblit.com/
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the niche, but the reasons you listed to enter aren't very good (namely, too expensive for lots of small projects) as BitBucket solves that problem.
Never ever ever ever compete on price.
https://github.com/edu
I'll gladly pay a reasonable fee for hosted services so I don't have to worry about such things.
(5. have repo world readable when security fails)
Not that I'm recommending this approach. That side, I do have GitHub repos that are also in my Dropbox, so I can collaborate with non-technical folk. It works great and haven't had a single issue with it in about 6 months of usage.
2. I don't know how good I feel trusting my source code to a sorta-startup run by a small group of fulltime students. I don't think you should quit school to run this startup, but I do think this is an awfully serious service to try to offer in your spare time.
Yes, it's a developers job to ensure that he has backups -- and Git repos lend themselves to this very well. But that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to treat your user's code as if they have no other copies and no other backups.
3. Your post about why the world needs another Git hosting service just explains why you think Github isn't the right fit. It doesn't really make your case.
4. When you're talking to engineers and you write this big setup paragraph about how much work it was just to share a git repo, and all of us are familiar with the myriad of hosting options, it just makes you look like you either don't know about your competition or you're hoping we don't. Not an effective strategy.
5. Github will give free repo's to students. And if you're not a student and you want a private repo paying a small amount for it is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. My code is valuable to me. I want to pay you a fair sum for a fair service.
I don't think you should quit what you're doing if you're having fun, learning, and believe in your idea. But GitHub is a huge brand with a ton of goodwill from the community. BitBucket is own by Atlassian which generally makes great things. Both have fantastic GUI's for Windows & Mac and great websites. So far I haven't heard anything that differentiates you. Don't treat me like I'm dumb, just show me why you're better.
2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to apply such a generalization to all students.
3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across succinctly.
4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why we created Legit Teams—they were the context.
5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when developing with others.
You could probably overcome that by going the balsamiq route and showing a consistently growing, profitable business. It's not an accident that it's normal to announce funding rounds in a press release: being able to associate yourselves with either massive profits or trusted brand name investors gives you credibility that being a couple guys with a good looking landing page doesn't.
I hope you take this all in a constructive way and know that I, and most other people in our industry, applaud you for shipping.
> number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work.
> As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our
> own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.
Bitbucket provides free, unlimited hosting for students. There's no limit on the number of collaborators. All you have to do is validate your university email address and you'll go from 5 users for free to the unlimited educational plan.
I have a lot of code. A LOT. It's mostly random things around data to make tracking things in my life easier (diet being the most recent one). And most of the code is crap in two ways: (1) I'd never want to be associated with it in a public sense and (2) It's so specialized to my life that it's unlikely that anyone would use it or contribute to it. Sure, there might be a few hundred people in the world that could find it useful, but those few hundred are unlikely to happen upon my kludged-up solution, and if they are, I'd feel badly when it doesn't work for them the way it works for me due to my personal configuration being hard coded throughout.
- http://beanstalkapp.com/
- http://www.deployhq.com/
I host all my private work with them and have never had a problem.
* Unlimited repositories
* Unlimited users
* Web interface / Trac / WebDAV, SSL everywhere
* Responsive support
* Automatic scheduled backups to Amazon S3
I'd focus on why you're different than the (already loved and highly used) existing options out there. Then I'd think about revamping the pricing to have each plan be more differentiated.
Simple Free 1 MB
If I am correct in my guess, then I really think its a great marketing strategy, and if not then BitBucket guys should really think of marketing in this way.