Which pricing model is more effective: GitHub's or Bitbucket's?
I have a product that I plan to release soonishly. I am planning on doing a free-for-public, pay-for-private pricing model. For the latter, the choice is essentially between Github's model and Bitbucket's model. Github allows unlimited private collaborators but charges by the project. Bitbucket allows unlimited private projects but charges by the collaborator.
My question is: have any of you decided between these pricing models for your product? If so, how did you decide? Also, any related resources would be appreciated. Thanks!
13 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 684 ms ] threadWe need more information before we can tell you what to charge and how to charge it.
I think the Github vs. Bitbucket question is a proxy that I can easily translate into my scenario. So in that case, what are the relevant factors?
The interesting thing about Github vs. Bitbucket is that both usage patterns can make sense depending on the project and user. For individuals, you might have a lot of repositories for small projects that end up abandoned after a while. For teams, it might make more sense to have a flexible headcount.
It really depends on the structure of your market and your competitors. There's not enough information in your post to say anything more helpful than that.
So, can you elaborate? Why is Bitbucket better for closed-source and Github better for open-source projects?
BitBucket is free for private repos up to 5 users. This is better for closed-source projects.
As I get it, you probably want to let users start for free when their requirements are small, and start changing as they grow. I suppose everyone has different needs, though — some value ability to spawn a dozens of tiny private repos, but some want just one for a relatively large team.
Then — just a wild idea — maybe assign some value for resources and services you provide and give a quota of what's free? Say, maybe, the formula could be repository count multiplied by collaborator count, so mediocre usage will stay under the threshold, raising either repo count or collaborator number alone (possibly, until the number is sufficiently large) still wouldn't be enough to leave the free tier, but raising both would nearly instantly require paying for your services. Something along those lines.
This probably could be confusing to customers (although some flexible cloud providers seem to deal with it with those fancy price calculators page with resource sliders), but maybe you'll think something. Or not.
And it certainly depends whenever your customers actually want such flexibility and there's enough diversity of use cases among them. Maybe they don't care and everything fits into something simpler. Then, for me, I think it's BitBucket's model — even though most of my repos are public (and are on GitHub), I have two private ones (on BitBucket), with no collaborators.