COMMENTS
Hi, Andy
Thanks for all your work and updates,
Congrat with this release!
Catalog and tickets improvements are great!
Thanks &
Regards,
Igor
Hi Andy,
being an open-source developer who hosts a project on Assembla, I am a bit disappointed about your move of strategy. As you may suppose, open-source projects (at least the smaller ones and especially when you're developing for niche areas) are not willing to finance their non-profit projects. Since I like assembla really much, I would really like to see a free option for open-source projects.
Best wishes,
Matthias
Matthias, we DO offer a free option for open source projects. All feature are free for publicly visible projects, such as open source projects. I will try to communicate more clearly.
Andy,
first of I can understand that your administative and financial capabilities are not enough to offer a free service with this quality you did up to now.
I used asembla for more than one year now and was pretty amazed about what you offer (for free). The down side of all this is that I cannot afford it (even with your low prices) since I am a student and I do not have no financial capabilities either.
Sure, I could convert my projects into open source, but for some university stuff this is not possible (and private stuff, too) due to copyright issues.
So I wonder if one has a little time to clean up and maybe you offer the possibility to save trac tickets, commit logs, etc. - it would be pretty bad to be forced to pay or everything is gone. How long is it until we need to deceide pay or not pay?
Anyways, thanks for the good (and free!) service up to now.
Andy,
I forgot to ask: Have you some statistics for each space which show the usage in storage space and repository usage (I guess this means the traffic?).
Thanks and regards,
Tom
OK - so what's the minimum then? Is it $2/month for the first 1GB (or 200MB) + $3 per GB after that? Or is the minumum $5/month for 1GB? The pricing as it's worded now does not make this clear.
Is that $2 per user per space per month for every member of a space or just the owner?
When is the deadline to decide if we want to Pay or go Public, before we see our sites transformed to read-only?
Thanks!
Andy,
I think this could have been handled better. The switch was inevitable, of course, but this is the first time I became aware of this new development, and frankly, although the cost is low, I'm feeling a little more pressure to commit than I'm comfortable with. What's the timeframe for deciding?
It is a bad news for me...
Yes it was good for univeristy projects.
Please do not be alarmed. We are not going to delete your data, or expose it to the public. And, there is some time to decide. If you do not respond to our up grade request in a few weeks, we will "restrict" your space to a read-only mode, but it will not be deleted or exposed. We never archive data until it has been unused for at least three months.
If you need to move to a different host, we can help with that. We will release an export utility so that you can bring data out. Trac and SVN have export scripts on the Trac Admin page.
If you run a university project, in many cases you can use a Free Public project. Over the past year, we have provided additional disk space to university projects with a special "Volunteer" . However, we got hundreds of requests for this, and I found that I was not able to respond to them all and do my other work, even working nights and weekends and ignoring my small children. So, we are asking university projects to fit into our standard free plan. I am also talking to a major software company about sponsoring university projects. They would pay for the space, in exchange for the right to email recruiting messages to the team members.
Off to SourceForge.
Im frankly disappointed that this had to happen. You guys where *the* place for free closed-source hosting.
I work on a non-profit project, but need to be secret until we had something to show to the public.
Now that there is no where else for private hosting, i guess ill go over to SourceForge now because it has a more up-to-date SVN server, so i can Merge my branches.
Good point. We'll get the svn server version upgraded in the next week.
How would you recommend that we support free closed source hosting? We pay for servers, and we spend a lot of time answering support questions. It's tiring to provide support, and I'd like to know that we are getting support in return. Our problem is precisely that the other guys don't offer free private hosting, so we get the shoppers that are specifically looking for free. People who are specifically shopping for "free" are very unlikely to buy anything from us. We can't cover it with Web ads ads, because the spaces are shown only to the team, and most of the free users use only the svn client.
Sure it is understandable. But it would be really interesting to see some statistics how our accounts have been used until now. I am interesten in how many traffic I caused and how many space I do use - just to estimate the costs.
Thanks and Regards,
Randy
Good job killing your userbase
It might make more sense to charge a fee per user (login ID) instead of per project space. If you have a lot of small projects, your new pricing can add up fast... You can also charge by the sum of a user's (all of their projects) disk space. What do you think?
One of my university's lecturers specifically encourages us to use Assembla for our semester long group projects - that has to be kept secret (at least until submission) for obvious plagiarism issues.
Isn't there some model that can fit in with this, without trying to charge already moneyless students large amounts?
I was a free user storing all my small projects to be honest, but with the reduced pricing I'm happy to support the company by purchasing a plan (was a tad pricey for me earlier as this is just hobby work of mine)
It would be nice to base the entire thing on per user/disk quota though, as others mentioned above, per-space adds up quickly, especially for
hobbyists like me that have many small projects, and very few of them take up much room at all. Due to that I've been combining all my small projects into one big SVN space
Anyhow, Assembla is great, and this was probably a wise move for you, I plan on staying, thanks for all the work!
This is great news. I've noticed performance issues recently (in New Zealand) and glad to see you are asking for a small fee to help maintain/support it. This is the real world after all. I was even going to request a better performing, small fee service.
Assembla is a great. You have priced yourself reasonably. I don't see how anyone can moan.
Make sure you offer a 30 day trial for newbies.
Good work guys, and keep it up.
This is superbad. I wish you would've given some time to think about this!
"Oh we're changing everything tomorrow thx bai!" Great way to ruin a weekend =(
The payment scheme is pretty bad for me. I was planning on having several small spaces for each of my individual projects. Now I'd have to pay five bucks for each, even if their combined size is less than 100 megs.
Common guys. It is the price of cigarette packet or of a bear. Don't smoke one day or do not drink one bear, instead support your project ;-).
Price for disk space is calculated per 10Mb, so you will pay $0.03 per 10Mb, 30 cents for 100Mb, so for small projects with one team member you will pay $2.30.
For university projects, each member can contribute with a small amount to support the project.
Like written earlyer I don't think I can afford to pay all of my (currently) 13 small projets - which sum up to about 200 MB. 5 of them could be made open, but the remaining not.
I would welcome it to pay for the used space (200 MB in my case) and why not in 1GB steps (but smaller steps would be better :)). If I pay 5€ per space (as your plan suggests, $2 per user and space plus $3 per user and used space (per space I guess?)) I would end up with $40 (8 spaces with much less then 1GB - 5 would be made open). Sorry but as a student this is impossible.
What do you think about a
donation system? Many people would donate something for a good service as yours.
And one again - could you please be clearer about if "repository usage" means
traffic and used space? (and if this is calculated per space) There are many open questions about this...
Well, it had to happen one day. It's a business decision, and I fully support you in this.
What bothers me is, that you didn't just change the model for new users, but also decided to hit all your userbase (that's us) by enforcing this on us.
I decided to use Assembla because it was free, yeah, and I trusted you so much to give you all my data, svn commit history etc because I thought it would stay that way. Opening access to my code and everything is no option. Now I have to pay for what I thought would be free forever or loose a big part of my data and invest hours and hours porting my data to somewhere else.
Again, I support your decision to change your business model. But please, not for the old users that trusted you to not do something like that.
And to add to previous posts:
$2 per user is totally okay, but please get rid of the "per space" thing. It makes it impossible for small student or private projects to use Assembla cost-efficiently.
So to sum it up:
1. Don't change modalities for existing users.
2. Get rid of "per space" pricing.
Thanks,
Jan
If i try this link http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/assemblamylyn/How_To_Use i get permission denied. Can someone point me to the mylyn connector for assemla tickets? Not the trac connector... tnx
Well, this sucks. I guess I'll have to set up my own SVN and Trac for next semester.
Thanks a bunch assholes.
Peter, I don't think that's in any way appropiate. If 99% of their users are people like you, no wonder they don't care what happens to the old userbase.
yeah it was inevitable...it is unfortunate for students (like me) who will probably leave assembla.
Thank you anyway for what you did.
Randy says "it would be interesting to see some statistics ... just to estimate costs." Currently, our hosting costs are about $5K/month, and I estimate our admin costs are another $5K/month, and our email and forum support costs are about $2K/month. I'm not going to include application development costs, which are much bigger. We serve about 50,000 users in any given month, of whom at least 45,000 are free. So, we are serving a lot of people very efficiently. I will be conservative and say that of the $11K in base hosting and support costs, half of it is for free services, or $6K. That's how much I pay you guys out of my own pocket. It's a lot to give way to people that don't really care about me, but we can pay for it out of the profits of the other parts of the business. In theory, it would be a good marketing investment if it encouraged people to buy products from us.
However, there are two problems. The first problem is that the free service was so generous, that it prevented people from buying the paid service. We have many examples of customers that are big users of the free service, and have raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and then declined to pay even a $20 upgrade. Clearly, we need to apply some discipline there.
The second problem is more expensive. Usage of the free workspaces grows at about 8x per year. So, if we are paying $6K/month for hosting and administration now (a conservative estimate), then we will be paying $48K/month in one year, for a run rate of $576K per year. This is an exponential curve, so it has curving behavior. It went along fine for two years on the small end of the exponential at a price we could afford. But, once it turns the corner, it blows you out of the water. There is no scenario after it turns the corner where we can just work a little harder to earn consulting or licensing money to support the community. The cost grows too quickly. We must match revenues to costs somehow.
Vitalie clarified the billing. The disk space charge is only for disk space. There is no charge for traffic. I pay my hosting company for traffic, but we currently don't monitor it or bill it to users. You can see the disk space usage on your Admin/resources page. In our current system, we have it set up to bill in $0.30 increments, which would give you a $2.30 minimum charge per space if your space has an owner.
It's not my goal to be the cheapest. I would rather be the best and charge more. But, we went for low pricing because we are trying to accommodate the existing users.
Because our some of our users want free service and are unwilling to support us in any way, there will be no price level that everyone feels is reasonable. We had spaces at $50, and people said it was too expensive. So, we moved it to $20. Then people said that was reasonable, but they have a lot of small projects, and they want to pay less per project. So, now we have reduced the price to $2.30. You can keep complaining because it is not zero, but you must admit, $2.30 is very cheap.
Jan, you say that you can't afford to pay for 13 spaces. However, if you make 5 public, and pay for 8 at $2.30, then you are only paying $18.40 per month. That's less than any competing bundles that I have seen.
It seems too cheap to me. Our competitors charge more. A truly successful SaaS business likes salesorce.com has an average price of about $100/user/month. A similar feature set at Jira Studio is $50/user/month. Our prices go as low as $1 per user per month. We have to be INCREDIBLY efficient to provide redundant servers, phone and email support, application development, etc. at those price. It's basically impossible. That raises the question: How will I feed my family and send my kids to college?
We could charge per user instead of per space, but if we did that, we would have to charge around $25/user/month to be at a price that typically supports a business like ours. We thought our users would appreciate the smaller, more granular charges. It sets us up to to add "premium" tools that bigger businesses will pay a lot more for, which could help pay for service to everyone else.
In most cases, setting up your own svn and trac will cost you more than you pay Assembla, if you pay for the computer and you value your own time at more than $1/hour. And as a matter of common courtesy, I recommend that you not call me an "asshole" after I have invested in the time and money to support your project, and you have contributed nothing in return.
If you don't agree, we provide various ways to take your data to someplace even cheaper, if you can find it. You will not "lose your commit history". You can export your SVN repository from the trac admin page.
I don't think it's a bad deal at all. But have you considered maybe an option to have ads displayed to cover part of the cost? These could be highly targeted to your users. Perhaps only showing these in the free service, or having an opt-in to get a price discount if ads are displayed?
Just for the record:
I didn't say anything about 13 spaces, that was someone called 'Tom K. '.
Andy, I totally get your point and understand how you came to the solution that you announced in this post.
Perhaps some of my own usage examples will help to understand why Assembla was the perfect fit for me and won't be with your new plans (although their prices are totally reasonable for some other usages):
1. Six students doing a project for 2 semesters (1 year), probably about 100 tickets and 500 commits that use about 20 MB of space. They also use the milestones, chat and scrum tool for project management and create about 50 entries there.
This will cost about $170. And for them, this clearly is too much (in the country I live, don't know if students are richer in US). So no more SVN for them, but shared disk on some university server behind VPN and 3 proxies.
2. I am developing lots of small tools, libraries and hacks for various things. I need good version control so I can work with all my PCs and when I travel, Trac and the other tools also are interesting for some projects. Because I'm a tidy man and like a structured environment I don't want to just use one SVN for all of them (mixed commit history numbers sucks) - so I will end up paying $2 many many times. Even for projects with only <50 commits per year and almost no space or other resources (like support!) used.
I see that you compare yourself to other services, that I would never ever consider using for these things at all. But Assembla was perfect for such small things. And I hoped it would be in the future. Perhaps there is a way to, like spaces with multiple SVN accounts for seperate subproject history or things like that.
And so you don't get the impression I am one of the "I need everything for free" people:
I do have one 'bigger' project (that makes me money and is more serious) where I will pay the money without even thinking about it. Your system is perfect for developing it, it really uses some of your resources - so no problem.
Anyway, it's your product, but perhaps you see why some people aren't happy. And please, just ignore this idiot calling you an asshole. Such people are on the internet, and sadly there is no way to mute them. But don't let it get to you. You were and are doing a great job with assembla.
PS: Bigger input textarea here in the blog would be nice ;)
My first thought about this change was: "goodbye assembla, get another free host".
However, after reading this, I just realized that how can I expect this kind of great service to be free? I don't agree with the people who are whining about this change - after all, Andy is paying the hosting of our projects. We owe many thanks to Andy and to other people who have given us the opportunity to use this great service. I hope you guys have enthusiasm to keep the service up.
As a student, I am also a bit dissapointed that I can't really use this in my school projects anymore (since free projects are public -> plagilarism). But hey, how can I expect this, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Universities have the servers and should themselves provide a hosting for SVN and trac for their students, and not just recommend to use Assembla, and thus use Andy's money . You guys should propose to your university that they would provide this kind of service to those school projects.
I *love* Assembla's features and site.
I cannot stand how bad the communication is here.
I have to come visit the blog and forums to find out about immediate issues? No emails? No long-term planning ahead? No warnings?!
This is very unprofessional. You have an amazing product, but you guys really need to get it together from the business end. Did you change management or something?
This makes me really worry that one morning I'll wake up and we'll be locked out because some last minute change that doesn't allow us time to react.
Sorry to sound harsh. As I said, I have nothing but praise for your product, but you absolutely must change your communication policies, or we'll have to suffer through some other crummy project management site.
Thanks.
Trust.
I think that almost everyone understands the situation of Assembla and agree that a solution was needed. But the way this change is happening will end on destroying the trust from your clients. Assembla has a good service? Yes. The new plans are cheap? Yes. But will we trust your service after this? I don't know.
This problem should have been solved since the beginning.
I don't know if we are going to stay in Assembla, but I really doubt it - we would need around $60, and we aren't even a company yet.
Anyway, thank you for everything. Your service was really great. Assembla was a great help to entrepeneurship.
I will try to come up with a new plan for free student projects. Our old way of approving each project took too much time. However, maybe we can make arrangements with universities or find some more automated way to approve them.
I am not going to reduce the price for everyone else. That would be ridiculous. Let's support this service at the level of quality we all want.
Thanks for listening to us. Shows real greatness.
Ok, whilst I see and understand the need for you to have ways of covering in your costs for hosting such a fine service, this was a blow below the belt buckle for me.
I have enjoyed your services for a quite some time now, I've managed to persuade quite a few users to it, and we've all been very happy with it. Our projects are non-profit, and our members are spread all over the globe. Before Assembla, it was a nightmare having to wait for people to come online to give you a modified file, and if some of you couldn't get there in time, things got even more delayed. Since our projects are reliant on 3D models and textures, they also take up good amount of diskspace.
I'd happily host a server myself, but the ISP doesn't allow me, and I don't have enough money to get a compliant computer running for it.
As I said, I understand the costs and all, that's fair enough. But although I work, I have a very low salary. My wages barely covers my monthly rent and food. That in itself is a blow to me. But you need your rent and food too, it costs you to host such a service. That's fair enough.
What I find is a blow below the belt buckle, is the fact that I first get no personal notification whatsoever of the SVN move, followed up by no personal notification whatsoever of the pricing issues. I found out about this today, since I hadn't checked Assembla the last few days (it's a voluntary project, not my daytime job... I don't check it each and every day). Luckily, a friend of mine noticed and warned me. Have you ever heard of e-mail notification? That could have at least prepared us for this move, and given us a proper chance to look at how we should approach this issue, instead of what we're doing now, having a crisis meeting.
It's a real shame that you have such an otherwise great service, manage some insane amounts of projects, complex tools, etc., but you can't for the life of you send out a small, global e-mail to us whenever something is up. It's pure luck that made us notice, nothing else.
I'm sorry if I'm being harsh, but this is a very harsh blow for us, and we didn't even get any proper notice, which is in my book unprofessional no matter what.
So what about an advertising based income. If your free project spaces did this at the least, you should get a good bit of cash in. Lots of free services survive (even make huge profits) this way (facebook).
I don't mind paying for private spaces, but I have several (public and private) projects with different team members. Can we please have a different cost structure than just on a per space basis? A few of my projects are embedded software projects don't use much space (<10 MB) but I depend on your subversion service. If you can make it storage space, user based, or provide a better deal for users with multiple small accounts, I would appreciate. Else, I'm going to have to figure out how I'm gonna integrate some and move the rest to sourceforge.
Oh and if you can provide plans for universities, I can talk to a few of my project advisors here at Cornell University ECE department. I know a lot of projects here that could use project hosting. We have been planning to use Assembla for this year's AmbuMedics project.
Oh and if you can provide plans for universities, I can talk to a few of my project advisors here at Cornell University ECE department. I know a lot of projects here that could use project hosting. We have been planning to use Assembla for this year's AmbuMedics project.
Oh and if you can provide plans for universities, I can talk to a few of my project advisors here at Cornell University ECE department. I know a lot of projects here that could use project hosting. We have been planning to use Assembla for this year's AmbuMedics project.
Oops, sorry about the repeat.
As others, I was rather surprised by your announcement. I use Assembla for open-source and private projects. My income is also not the highest. To sum it up, I am like many others of your users. However, I waited a little to let the initial anger (about not being informed in advance...) cool down and write an honest response.
I can understand and even support your change. I will move some projects (which are finished anyway) off assembla, which is more like cleaning my closet than being scared away. Regarding the active, but closed-source projects I have to think about this. The open-source projects are a no-brainer :-)
Your system is great, there is no question about this. Buying yor service for the private projects is therefore a perfectly valid option. As many other, I would have appreciated a better "warning" to this change, so I could have talked to all people involved before.
Another problem I have is, that I don't really understand the cost of having a private space here.
Please update your "Plans"-Page, maybe even provide some examples, so I can make an informed decision. I can derive some information from the comments here, but I would like to have them on a dedicated page so I can direct my co-workers to it and then talk about it.
Your features and services are great, but I have to say that your communication strategy could be improved a little.
Another idea for changing the plans would be to offer a single free private space with limited storage or user-limit or just subversion and trac... Other Trac/SVN-Providers have such plans as well, but as your price is (as far as I understand the pricing) rather low, this might not be possible or desirable. I don't have enough information about your internals to really judge about this. I just wanted to say it...
BTW thank you for pointing me to the display of the used disk amount for a project. I missed this a lot.
Yes, we need to improve our communication, starting with the fact that there is NO EMERGENCY. We are still providing free services. Everyone that owns free private spaces will get an email on Tuesday. There is a transition period.
We try not to send a lot of bulk emails, because we do not want to be marked as spammers. In this case, I wanted to release the new version of the software, find out what questions people had, and then make sure that when we sent out an email, we answered all of those questions. So far, this is going according to plan - thanks to your help. In this comment stream we have discovered a number of questions that we should answer more clearly.
We will provide some sort of a free plan for students.
I have been informed that there are other services that offer free private subversion repositories. We're ceding some ground to those services, for reasons noted above: Subversion is a commodity with a low price (although it is quite valuable); the volume and costs escalate quickly; and our relatively generous free plan was preventing users from buying paid subscriptions to our the higher-value applications. We have been investing in all facets of our team application, and we need to find users that appreciate that. We provide various export mechanisms, such as the subversion dump, for users that want to move, and we will add export scripts for additional types of data.
There was a suggestion of supporting free spaces with advertising. That's a good idea. However, there are some issues implementing it in this case. Most of our free users use subversion clients more than Web clients, and we can't show ads when they do that. Because the projects are private, the traffic to them from the Web is limited by definition. So, we would have a lower yield that Facebook, which runs at a loss. Still, there might be some opportunity to sell sponsorship of emails or something like that, and we will investigate that opportunity.
Uhm, first of all - thanks for being so generous to us all this time. Many many thanks.
Second - I got a suggestion. Most of my freelancing friends are using Assembla like very-advanced-basecamp for their projects. Those projects has non-linear activity, like once done - they're frozen. Please can we have ability to "archive" projects like those with disk-quota based payments?
P.S. Please get me right - it is ok to pay for those projects while they're active (price will be included into the bill ;-)), but once they're done - it is not much sense to keep paying for those, so my model of Assembla usage is screwed. I'd liked to pay decreased fee for an archived project, with no activity, but keeping it private and amongst my spaces.
P.P.S. (sorry) It seems we already have an alternative to 'archiving' projects - non-upgraded projects will be set to 'read-only'. Sadly, it seems this will work only for existing projects. 'Read-only' looks great for me, so if you'll keep it for new projects as well, or even introduce decreased fee for 'read-only' private projects - that would be fine (speaking for myself).
Please update that link to MyLyn connector - it's forbidden atm.
So lame. Especially the per space charges. Why can't I just pay for my storage?
I can understand the move, but I also understand complains about the "per space" payment. May I suggest (even if it could be a little bit tricky) to allow to manage subspaces within a space, so that you may charge per space/per user/per GB but allow people to manage and work with more than a single project in one space. Companies or individuals may buy a private space, include as many people as they want for $2/month, usa as big space as they need at $3/GB/month and organize this stuff in as many projects as they want.
I think most people here aren't complaining about the price (assembla being free always seemed to me a bit too good to be true), but because:
1. Your post seems to imply that we only have a week to make a decision to migrate or be locked out. From a reply you have given, this seems to not be the case. However it would be nice if this was formally noted. It should also be sent via email and put as a notice on assembla, eg "assembla no longer offers free service. You can continue to use any existing spaces for free until Jan 1, 2009, then you will have to upgrade to continue usage". I know you are worried about sending bulk messages, but this is a really important message.
2. The prices you are offering are exceptionally good if you are doing large spaces (and by large I mean > 50MB). However if you use many very small (< 10MB) spaces, which was encouraged by assembla due to the ease of creating new spaces, then it is quite expensive. I'm not sure why there is such an overhead for each new space, since in a small project the cost of the space ($2) would dwarf the disk cost use ($0.03). Perhaps you should consider raising the disk space cost, and reducing/elimiating the new space cost, or have 10 free spaces with every account.
3. You should note that there will be tools available to export existing data, so that it doesn't seem like you are blackmailing us into paying by holding our data to ransom (I know you didn't intend that, but noting the export tools would ease some fears).
Give a thing, and take a thing, to wear the Devil's gold ring.
Since we're all saying what we don't like: for me it's that I have to pay for each user. Some of these users will just be customers or testers who won't be checking in files, and rarely if ever accessing the site (although they'll insist they need the 'option' to see what's going on). It would be nice if there were different roles. For example: "customer" and "tester" can only add/edit tickets. But these would not be contributing to source repository and would only be using the website. These accounts could be paid for by advertising.
Free and public
or
Paid and private
This makes complete sense to me. If I am offering my software free to community then I would like it to be build using free tools too. However if my work is private then someone has to pay for developing it and since its not community, then it would be service provider (like Assembla), unless I choose to pay for it myself. How long can someone else provide for you?
Looking at comments I feel its only the university students that did not like the approach. Solution here would be for these students to ask their university to contact Assembla and have some university/student subscription. Where a university pays x$ for y students to host their projects. Students anyway pay their universities fee to study, so money can come out.
Thanks
Sachin
Changing terms for existing users (regardless it's free) is NOT fair. I call it a dirty trick. I'm leaving assembla and if I have to pay, I'm going to do it somewhere else.
We are not students and we are not complaining about private and paid in principle, what my company is complaining about is the complete lack of professional communication coming from Assembla. They desperately need someone to get their communication strategy into shape.
I want to second the statement made above: 'It would be nice if there were different roles. For example: "customer" and "tester" can only add/edit tickets. But these would not be contributing to source repository and would only be using the website. '
There needs to be a separate class of user because we really need "light" users who only deal with tickets during betas, etc. It really reduces the value of the service if I have to cut out everyone to only the core development team. Even if these users were like $.50 a piece, it would be better than paying full price for them.
I'm leaving assembla and if I have to pay, I'm going to do it somewhere else. Well, I go where I get the best service for the money. (Probably still Assembla) But that's just me...
Hey Guys -
First off, thanks for all of your work on Assembla. It really has filled in a rather large niche and it's understandable that you need to make a move to get support for all of your efforts.
You might want to encourage folks who use contractors to make temporary accounts that they can give to their folks. Right now I've brought everyone that has contracted for me on as a separate user so that I can track their activity, but many of them haven't worked on the project in months, so it doesn't map well to the $2/mo/user model. For my stuff, I'd far prefer a pure disk space meter and then maybe a paid support plan. BUT, I'd imagine you talked this over a ton and didn't make the decision lightly.
we are small developing studio and I have already paid for commercial space but it gave me nothing in advance...your new pricing policy eliminates the freedom (now I cannot add more people just to test, to see, cannot start a test space..)
We have no problem in paying - what more, we would like to pay! but we want something back - the paying and not paying has'nt so far made any diffrencies - no premium services and no extra tools..
now it might be really disappointing for many people.
for example - I love assembla and I want to put team even with time tracking, but even in commercial space I CANNOT FILTER THEIR REGISTERED TIME in desired period...so what to use the time tracking for?
It seems everyone here is happy to pay. What we need is open discussion about payment plans.
Clearly, they should be activity and/or disk-quota based.
Of course you can push currently published plans, Andy, but in this case many of us will stay on Assembla on free accounts (although willing to pay) and will move to more flexible alternatives for paying accounts... Like, on unfuddle I'll get 4 open accounts and 4 archived for 9usd / month, so if i have more than 5 small projects - it makes sense to migrate. But i don't want to! Assembla spaces are so incredibly flexible, we just need payment plans with flexibility like that of spaces. =)
We will try to communicate more clearly. We will continue to improve the communication plan we have in place, which is as follows:
* You can call me ANY TIME at 1.781.328.2241. The telephone number is on every page footer.
* We are still providing free services, and everyone will get a transition period to decide what to do.
* We are answering all of the questions in this comment stream
* We will accumulate the answers into an email that will go to all users. We will also send more specific email messages to owners of free private spaces.
I have seen a lot of these negotiations for lower prices. We started charging $50/space/month, and people said that was too much, and they wanted a lower price. So we moved to $19/month. Then people started calling me and asking for the $12.50/month annual rate, on a monthly subscription. They actually spent hours of their time trying to save $6.50 per month. This can't be a good use of time, but it is human nature. Then, they said they needed smaller prices per space because they have a lot of spaces, so we reduced the price again, and divided it into smaller pieces, for users and disk space. Now the price is down to $2.30, and STILL users are negotiating for lower prices. This is human nature. You guys are good negotiators, and you have gotten a good deal out of Assembla.
You can try to negotiate a lower price for "customers", but at some point it is silly because the numbers are just too small. We are competing against services like Fogbugz and Jira Studio that charge $25 or $50 per user per month. They can support high quality services. If we reduce our price to $0.50, then how much money will we get out of a specialized programming community? $1000/month? How low is low enough? How do the numbers add up to support the quality level that our users demand? What is your opinion? My total cost is about $40,000/month, so I need to get revenue numbers in that range. $0.50 per user doesn't do anything.
You can say that we should charge only for disk space. We studied at that. It doesn't bring in enough money. Most projects use less than 100MB. If we charged for disk spce, it would need to be a big charge, and you would be even more upset. So, this is another negotiating tactic to get a lower price, but not a practical solution.
You can say that we did something bad because we changed the deal for existing users. However, on my side, I have new information that forces us to respond. I assumed that if users had a good experience with the free service, they would upgrade, especially if they were running private projects that could benefit from encryption. I also assumed they would want to support the service. I was wrong. The majority of private users, even well funded ones, continued to use the free service because for them. Is that bad? No, it is human nature. But it requires a response that protects and expand our services for users that are willing to contribute.
Even for users that do not want to support us, we will provide transition services. For users that stay with us, we will do much more.
I hope to work more closely with all of you. Call, email, or post with additional advice.
Adam, thank you for your commercial subscription and your comments.
I expect that most existing commercial customers will get a price reduction with our new subscription plans.
* We will credit the full amount of your last payment to pay for the new subscription plan - so you get double duty out of it. The credits will apply to any new spaces or users.
* If you believe that this results in a price increase, we will give you credits.
* If you are still not satisfied, we will issue a refund.
I am aware that the time reporting feature needs improvement. We are working on it. We have started by adding an "export" link beside the task list on the portfolio space Time tab. This goes to a panel where you can select tasks by date, and view them or export them to a spreadsheet.
If you send your specific requests, we will implement them in the next release.
Well, I've paid my initial subscription. But maybe you can make me feel good about my decision. Someone mentioned unfuddle. You didn't mention them in your list of competitors. Are you not trying to compete with their service? It seems if I have 2 devs and 4 testers working on 2 projects, then unfuddle is going to cost me $9/month, but your service will be 6 users * 2 projects * $2 + $0.30 storage = $24.30/month
Am I missing something?
As many have agreed, this is a very nice service. I know that I felt that this service was "too good to be true." Turns it out was. I think the primary emotion most people feel is disappointment and perhaps a bit of betrayal. In a sense, we have been baited and switched.
Andy- I think that you knew all along that you would have to eventually charge for this and thus it was inevitable that this blow up would happen. So, your mistake in all this was offering private spaces for free in the first place. You were offering a valuable service, deserved to get paid, and should have stuck to it from the beginning. You may have grown more slowly, but at least you would have been honest.
Others providers (and consumers) of services should learn from this.
Russ, thank you very much for your subscription. We will try to earn it.
Unfuddle is a good service, and their prices are also low. We are not trying to be the cheapest service in every possible scenario. We will have to match our competitors with a complete combination of service, features, and price. In some cases you might pay up to $15 more per month with Assembla. Is that the deciding difference? On the other side of the ledger, Assembla has more features, some amazing integrations coming up, and Assembla supports unlimited free public projects.
There is a difference between the topology of Assembla and the topology of Basecamp-style services like Unfuddle. With Basecamp/Unfuddle, a user is only a user inside a single customer account. I chose to design Assembla differently, with one big pool of users, because that is better for the users. I also feel strongly that it should be possible to move project ownership from a design or programming shop, to the client, when the responsibility changes. You can pass Assembla projects on to cover the full lifecycle of the project. That's impossible in the Basecamp/Unfuddle system. On the pricing side, in the that system, each user gets paid for in every customer account that they participate. It's not as far removed from the per-space charge as it looks at first glance.
Please let me know if I got this wrong, but the plan page says $2 per user/space, and $3 per gb. So, it seems to me that the current minimum price is $5.00 month (1 space/1 user/1gb).
This seems a little restrictive. My projects are personal, I don't get any money from it, but sometimes I have a friend helping or looking into something. I know you have a lot of tools and apps there, but I would rather pay only for the minimum.
You could come up with some packs, like Unfuddle has. I'd rather pay $5 to use half of the space but allow more users, or more projects.
Thanks.
This was NOT a bait and switch. Every startup business learns a lot in the first two years. For most of that time, I fully intended to offer generous free services. We got a relationship with a great pool of agile developers that helped with our recruiting. Also, if I can be honest, I figured that the price that many are willing to pay was too low to justify the pain of trying to chisel the money out of them. That's what we are seeing here. Easier just to be free. We STILL offer a very generous free public plan.
During this time, I collected the following new information.
* We would not be able to pay for the whole service on staffing revenue - the original plan. The standard markup of 10% isn't enough unless you use a lot of VC money to get yourself to a high volume.
* Many users sought out free private subversion repositories, which are especially difficult to "monetize". This was fine. I was happy to pay for it as long as the basic hosting and admin and support was affordable. However, growth is exponential, which means that at a certain point costs accelerate. And, as the number of users grew, free users started calling me at all hours with support questions, which is another type of expense.
* We have great commercial users that will stick with the free service as long as it is private and relatively generous. We need to bring them into the boat as customers.
So, we made a recent decision to compete for subscription revenue. That's great news for you, because it means we need to do an even better job on our features and customer service.
Fortunately, our business is healthy, and we have a great product, and we are ready to get down and work with you to make this a success.
It is not about being cheapest - it's about being flexible to suit user's needs.
Its not question of price, really - in current price model one part of users (those with lotsa small private projects used as personal portfolio or alike) will be paying for others (with big commercial intensively active projects), its just unflexible and... uhm, unfair.
Assuming all spaces are equal and should be payed as such is not looks quite right for me... Paying on per-space basis doesn't reflect actual activity (and costs to maintain) in any way.
Moreover, those who's willing to pay for open projects (like me) has no motivation to do so.
Privacy costs the money, of course, but binds the whole pricing model to privacy so tightly is kinda.. not flexible, imho.
No doubt your pricing is very generous. But atm its more generous to bigger companies/projects than to the 'small people'. I'd like to see exactly the opposite position, especially these 2.0 days... =).
P.S. Sorry for mistakes - english is not my native language, as my name points out ,)
@Dmitri, 12:15 PM:
That pretty much sums it up. It's small subsidizing big instead of the other way around.
The Basecamp/Unfuddle bundles are another way of negotiating a lower price. For some people, it would result in a lower price, and those people, as good negotiators will ask for the bundles.
We thought a lot about pricing with bundles. However, we rejected it for a very particular reason. Bundles have a fixed price, and you can't add additional charges to them without making things very complicated. This effectively means that we can't add additional paid features.
We have a bunch of interesting integrations with services that will involve additional pricing. For example, we are planning to add instant staging servers, and real-time meetings.
Companies like 37 Signals that offer fixed-price bundles put their new features into completely different products. So, you end up buying a lot of products, and paying more than you would with Assembla's metered billing. I see this frequently. In this case, people are happy to pay the extra, so it seems that the price is not the most important factor.
We are constantly expanding our feature set without asking you to buy a new bundle. So, Assembla is set up to offer more features, and a better selection of features. We aren't forcing our users to buy multiple bundles that will actually cost more. And, the metered billing is much simpler to administer and buy than multiple packages.
Andy, @12:41 - everything of that is very true.
Still, people are concerned about small subsidizing big. There's no such concerns in case of 37signals/unfuddle/S3/etc, because people has the feeling they're paying for themselves, not for the other guy. Everyone's got the same amount of service for the same money.
Assuming current assembla price model, small projects are more expensive than big ones. It is not a question of money, its purely psychological: on one hand I have a feeling that someone is paying for me, when I have big active but open project. I'm willing to pay but have no stimuli to.
On the other hand, I have a feeling that I'm paying for someone else, if I have a lot of small private portfolio projects. Ok - personally, I can balance it out, but its still very uncomfortable model for the customers.
Price and 'fairness' aren't the same thing.
Andy,
I would prefer 10 times paying $20 for 800 Mb and have as many spaces/users I can, than paying for space/user. You can say the plan you're currently offering it's cheap, but I think it's very unfair to small but VERY organized companies - like Webfuel. We have one space for each library/archived project and we are 6 developers + freelancers. What about offering two different plans, one that gives a full service for a fixed amount/space, and another one of $2/user/space?
You can expect that offering two solutions will result on less money - since users will just buy the cheapest one for their case - but remember that this way you'll be attracting more clients, than scaring them off to competition.
I can always install Trac+SVN on our VPS, but I would prefer to pay for having someone to take care of that service. I could go to Unfuddle - which would cost me $24 for 2Gb/10+10 projects and 20 users - but I would prefer keeping my current service at Assembla, where I feel happy. I just don't feel that the plan you're offering is fair, at least for companies in our situation.
I don't understand why you say that small projects are more expensive. We have reduced the minimum charge to $2.30. If a venture capitalist was lurking here, seeing me argue over $2.30, he would laugh. It's silly. Enterprise buyers are paying us 2000 times more.
Our metered billing is almost exactly the same as S3. You pay for what you use at the end of each month. S3 has a minimum sized slice with a minimum cost of $70 per month.
We like the idea of larger users subsidizing free users. However, there are two problems. First, the larger buyers ended up paying nothing. They find the cheap free plan for small users, and they use that. It's human nature. Second, larger buyers think they should get a volume discount. Wouldn't you expect a volume discount if you were paying the biggest bill?
We looked at a LOT of different plans, and I'm pretty confident our analysis was fair. What is your specific suggestion? What plan would deliver significant revenue to support our quality of service, and be "fair' by your standard? Remember, you are looking at this as a small user that wants a price break, and different types of users all want their own price break. Not an easy problem.
Just one thing. Correct me if I'm wrong:
Assembla: $2/space/user/month + $5/Gb
Unfuddle: fixed price of $24/m for 10+10 projects/20 users/2 Gb.
So the equivalent price in Assembla would be: ((10+10)*20*$2)+(2*$5)=$810. Or for 10 projects (since 10 of the projects on unfuddle are "archived")=$410 .
Have you done something wrong or you're comparing $410/month to $24/month and saying that your service is cheaper?
Also, we are a small company! One day we'll get bigger and survive with one or two SaaS solutions, but right now we live with several small projects. Which is DAMN expensive at Assembla!
By the way: you could feel that the people posting here are "bashing" you or being unfair. But remember that if I took the time and effort to post here instead of going directly to Unfuddle is because I respect you and I want to stay on Assembla. I am just trying to find a solution that is fair for both sides.
I don't understand why you say that small projects are more expensive. Because there's very little difference in price for small library with size under 5mb, and serious project with size nearly 100mb. There's no difference between inactive project and very active project.
We have reduced the minimum charge to $2.30. If a venture capitalist was lurking here, seeing me argue over $2.30, he would laugh. It's silly. Enterprise buyers are paying us 2000 times more. Well, your pricing IS EXTREMELY cheap. But small projects are just MORE expensive THAN big ones. It has nothing to do with absolute numbers. It's like taxing small business and extremely cut taxes on big corporations.
Our metered billing is almost exactly the same as S3. You pay for what you use at the end of each month. S3 has a minimum sized slice with a minimum cost of $70 per month. No, it is not almost exactly the same. S3 is taking money for a space and traffic, i.e for real activity. Imagine them taking money for the file count, and you'll get S3 version of Assembla pricing model.
What is your specific suggestion? My personal suggestion - activity based, like S3. Traffic usage (including svn) will take care of users doing nothing only handling tickets and inactive projects, and space usage will take care of small projects. Maybe it makes sense to giveaway a limited number of free projects per paying user.
Problem with Unfuddle is that they're trying to mimic 37signals pricing model 'for dummies'. Maybe Basecamp is for dummies (casual managers), but services like Unfuddle / Assembla are not.
Unlike 37signals pricing model, one of S3 is much more attractive for a regular developer - he's not buying that 'get our unique offer just for $24.99' crap, he want to see every Mb counted and to pay no cent more. Especially he doesn't want to pay for other guy from competing company.
Of course S3 is not the cheapest storage around, and I'm using a couple of others, but enjoying to pay (and doing so) only to S3. Others services are used on free accounts and I have no plans to upgrade them. I don't want Assembla to became one of those.
BTW, with S3-based pricing model it will be much easier to you to balance and estimate income and your expenses.
Joao, I understand. You are concerned about the situation where one payer (you) has a small set of users that appear in many spaces. You want to use the spaces for organization, but you don't want to pay many times for the same user.
I have looked through our database, and there is no situation where a user would be asked for $400/month. So, actually, you are not correct about this in practice. That's too bad for me, $400 would be a very small monthly charge for other application services like Salesforce.
However, since you are pressing me so hard on this issue, I will consider a discount system where we reduce or cap the per-user charges if the same user appears in multiple space for one payer.
It will be complicated to understand because UNLIKE UNFUDDLE, one Assembla user can be mixed into many different paying accounts. That's the idea.
You have one concern - to get a reasonable price. I share that concern, but I also have other concerns. Like S3, our system needs to support add-on charges. And, it needs to accommodate the fact that users are mixed together across different paying accounts.
Joao, you got me with your argument. I want customers to be comfortable using a lot of spaces. That is the way the system is designed. I use a lot of spaces.
I am going to modify the pricing so that if the same user appears in more than 3 or 4 spaces, the user charge is capped at $6 to $8. After that, you can add the user to as many spaces as you want.
Andy, that's a move in the right direction.
What still bothers me:
You talk about VC, investors, salesforce and stuff. That's your situation, so it's completely understandable. And there < $5 a month are laughable. But some of your users are, for example, just code monkeys at some business doing their small projects in the evening. For fun, for learning, for their girlfriend - or for later rollout as a startup. But at the moment the only thing they need is a decent version control and perhaps a bug tracker, and so that they can access it from everywhere they chose Assembla. They also have no big VPS or something, but 500MB of webspace somewhere where they deploy their stuff, so selfhosted is no option for them. These are the people where $2/user/space would really hurt.
While I certainly understand your fiduciary responsibility and running a cash flow positive business, I am surprised by two things:
1) The lack of notice given. I run a bootstrapped startup. We make plans based on costs. And using Assembla was one of those plans. Considering we're going live in several weeks - we have very little choice here. I am not happy with this decision - any costs are too much for us at our stage.
2) No option to grandather users in or to give us ample time to switch providers. We certainly could have used an alternate free service - but we chose Assembla because it was the best of those free options.
Marc, we are providing you with notice, and we are continuing to provide you with services. There is no need to act hastily. I wish you luck with the go-live, and we will support you through that period.
I'm getting a lot of criticism for releasing our system, and then telling people what we want to do with it. I am not sure how it would be different if we told people before we released. It would just be irritating because they would get a message suggesting that they should do something, but they would have no place to go to make the requested upgrades. Now we have a transition time where you can make any change - migrate or upgrade.
I run a bootstrapped startup too, and I planned ahead to pay my costs, and a little bit of yours. You are already paying for equipment, networking, and pizza. If you need to pay $10 to extend your subscription for a month - the price of one pizza - is it really going to make a difference?
@ "
I am not sure how it would be different if we told people before we released."
1. You:
Hey, we have a new version and will have to change the subscription model to ... because of ... What do you thing?
2. Us:
[All what was discussed and stated above and even more]
3. You:
Well, this and that and because of and so we will do this. Better?
Us:
[Goto 2, repeat]
You:
Voila, then it is xyz. Action will be taken on 99/99/9999. Mailing with notification will go out now and 2 weeks before that date.
Us:
Wohooo! You rock!
Or something like that ;)
The fact that you do not recognize you made a mistake (in multiple situations I've read your comments) makes me the most worried about the future of Assembla.
It's one thing to accidentally handle your customers improperly, and it's an entirely different thing not to recognize your mistake when they're crying at you.
As I've mentioned, your features rock. Your service rocks. But you've got to improve in managing expectations with customers. I think you're misunderstanding how important Assembla is to some of us. It's
our entire project life managed by you.
Step outside of what you see day to day-- you have to do that as a business owner.
Imagine you are putting all of your software eggs into a single basket. Imagine how comfortable you feel when everything is done with plenty of advance notice, no surprises at all.
Now imagine what happens if you're being surprised in strange ways, and the bedrock of your entire company/project is shifting under your feet. To top it all off, the management isn't understanding or apologetic-- they even go so far as mention about their VCs laughing at the plights of their customers.
Again, I love your features. I've even paid a year in advance already because they're simply too important to me right now and the price isn't bad.
But you must resolve the communication issues because right now I can't recommend this company to any other colleagues. This is based solely on your company's behavior and decisions and not your software. Last week, I was recommending you again and again to my friends. Now I'll get to look bad to them if they took me up on that.
People are betting their livelihood on you. Respect that and put into place practices that keep us all happily unsurprised. Your VCs aren't going to be laughing when your customers have lost faith in you. Don't let that happen!
If actual paying customers feel that they were not adequately informed, then indeed, we did make an error in communication.
I need to clarify one more thing. We do not have VC investors at Assembla. Instead, we work our butts off to pay every expense out of money that we earn from customers. That's why it's so important to have customer support. Because we put so much into this, it's important that we be delivering more than $2.30 worth of value somewhere. In place of the "VC" character that I mentioned previously, you could think of my wife (she has an MBA) rendering judgement, or the wives of our employees that also depend on our prudent management of this business.
We may be obscure, but we are not sneaky or deceptive. Every detail of this change was discussed on our ticket list during the last three months, and that ticket list is publicly visible to at https://www.assembla.com/spaces/breakout/tickets
Ok, I fully support your decision to drop free plan, but I hate the way you did it.
I have a lot of small closed projects, which don't really generate much traffic/server load. In fact, they are very lightweight. And it's not projects that bug your tech support, it's people. So I don't really understand why should I pay $2 for each space! If I have 100 different spaces I'm still one person and generate as much traffic as one person does!
It would make much more sense to charge monthly fee per-user (I'd say $5, but it's up to you) and monthly fee for disk space usage per project (and bill per 10MB or so - I think you already do so).
It's really disappointing for me. I have quite a few small projects and they aren't very active, but I'd have to pay a lot to keep them on your servers. Pointless!
So please consider a per-account fee. I'd be more than happy to support you this way, as I really like your service. Otherwise I'm gonna have to move to some place else, maybe not as functional and usable, but just enough to host a few small projects.
Oh MY GOD Let it GO!!!
The guy is asking for $ 2 BUCKS!!
You better be thankful that you got an Incredible service, for FREE for Years.
I live in Latinamerica, for me USD 2 are about 6 bucks in local money. Still, I think its a fair price. The services are awesome, and never passed more than a month without noticing improvements.
...
@Andy, thanks for all the time we got the service for free. I felt rather bad about this announcement, but after reading you here, I changed my mind inmediately.
Thanks also for that, beeing here, talking with us- thats also priceless.
Oh, one more thing: I dont believe in such thing as "human nature", rather I think it always is "human choice". But in this case, I think it was neither one.
The problem was about common sense: you didnt put any limitations to the free service, and neither stated some clear message about supporting Assembla. Till now, I though it was owned by a big corp! Given that, I cant imagine what motivations anyone could have to pay for a service you were giving for free.
As much as I can think thats your strategic error, its nothing about the mythological "human nature". However, this is only about a philosophycal perspective, on the matter itself, I'll support your decision.
Cheers!
I have two Assembla spaces. One of them is public and free. Other is closed and was a commercial project once. (I've started to use Assembla as personal portfolio/archive space). I'm not about to upgrade private space, because it won't be active in any foreseen future, and switching it to "read-only" suits fine for me.
But I'm willing to pay / support Assembla and only way to do so atm is upgrade my public space, although I don't need it.
I've just upgraded it to support Andy and to show my gratitude.
So we want to pay, but, Andy, pls tweak your pricing plan a bit =)
Er, is there an option to stop paying for a space?
Nevermind, already found it.
Can we have an option to set ex-payed space to archived / read-only state? I'd even payed for maintaining those.
Now that the heat has cooled down a little here, I want to second Dmitri regarding the need to update the plans page.
I am totally confused how much my configuration will cost and how my "archived" spaces affect this.
Which spaces get public, read-only or paid-private is hard to say now. I'm not unwilling to pay, but want to pay only for things I need
and can afford.
Robert, I now see the problem that our "per space" pricing plan creates if you have a lot of spaces for yourself. I have 60 spaces, mostly for me and the same Assembla team. I don't want to pay $120/month just for myself. As Joao pointed out, the numbers get unreasonable.
So, we are making an important modification. The price per user will be capped at $8 per month. This means that after you add yourself or a team member to four spaces, the fifth space through infinite spaces are free. You only pay storage charges (30 cents, in most cases).
This means pricing of $8 per user for serious users, and you can forget the "per space. However, if you are frugal and have only one space, you can get going for $2.
About stopping paying for a space -- I see that there is a bug in the current release that is hiding the unsubscribe button on the admin page. We will get this fixed before we charge anybody for anything.
Wooohooo!! Thanks, Andy, $8 is just great, no problems with that.
But what if I'm using Assembla as portfolio and inviting someone to take a look at my private space? And, like stated before, it would be hard to convince someone to pay for visiting dev page if he's already paying me for doing job... Is there any way to move those payments on project owner? Many people using Assembla not only for dev2dev but also dev2client communication...
I've been using Assembla for over a year ! you have excellent support and availability.
I always wondered ! HOW COULD YOU GIVE SUCH PLAN FOR FREE, WHERE PAID HOSTING DOES NOT HAVE THIS PLAN FOR THEIR PRO LEVEL PACKAGE.
It was a great experience with Assembla. I hope it will continue to serve as pioneer version control hosting.
GOOD LUCK
Great job guys on the upgrade and website. Assembla was too good to be true, now it is just a website that hosts great services.
The prices are too great for students who are paying all their extra cash on living expenses and tuition.
I would take the advice of 2$ per user. The user is able to join infinite amount of projects. Otherwise the price is outrageously high IMO. Especially hosting an environment for people who are TECH SAVI (Usually) They can host their own open source project management solutions /w SVN on a cheap 4-5$ a month VPS.
I respect your decision, but my teams are off to VPS land.
I've got to say, the one thing that worried me was that per space thing. I was just about to create a bunch of tiny one time use spaces for more atomic rights management on new users. I really like the solution. May I suggest updating the original article to give this a really positive spin? Hopefully that will prevent anyone else from having the heart attack moment the rest of us did. I notice people are still asking about the pricing structure, which means they aren't reading all the comments.
$2-$8 for a single user blows the competition out of the water. The space charges are also outrageously low, anyone taken a look at what salesforce.com charges for extra space? You don't want to know. The rates here are more than reasonable now that the per space thing is capped. You should take advantage of your generous rates in the way you market this service.
Now, I want to see Assembla maintain that 8x annual growth. That is a truely fantastic growth rate. I also want to see you get your money out of it. Your growth was based on offering free private spaces. Most of your competition offers some level of free, so if you kill it altogether, you will be at a disadvantage. Your competition however generally places the free cap at 20 MB, which is useless, even for a small, short term, personal project. The disadvantage of your competition's space cap is that we aren't stupid. People know they are getting on a treadmill, where they will eventually end up paying that $93.26 that they see on the comparison chart. This isn't comforting. You also have to pick something for the free end that is small enough that using it for anything serious is prohibitive, which prevents it from being a useful tool to attract serious users...your bread and butter. What if you continue with the generous free hosting, but limit it by TIME, rather than by space? Spaces for new users are free for, say, 6 months, at which point you pay. I'm going to get some retaliation for saying this, but I think that should NOT apply to your legacy users. We already got our free ride.
One thing you buy with something like 6 months free is the ability to continue to snag many of your standard user base. (For example: 6 months is long enough to get them through a full semester (almost 2) so the professors can continue to advocate your service. You might even be able to avoid the headache of academic pricing.) At the same time, there is an absolute moment of truth, where a person must decide to either pay the measly $2.30, abandon the project, open their source (which brings you traffic and can be monetized), or attempt to cheat the system. They won't leave, since that is painful, they owe you one, the product is awesome, and you are the cheapest option. Your current model isn't bad at all; you have 800% annual growth! You just need a model to ensure that people can't ride forever. Again, this argument isn't for me, start charging your current users right away, [braces for the inevitable backlash] but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. You want to keep that awesome growth.
I'm sorry but in my honest opinion this software that they porvide is EASILY worth over $50-100 a month. A simple 5-10$ a month for a HUGE project is asking to much? Think of how much Bandwith it's costing them to just allow you to FREELY use their amazing software. I've been using this for about 4-5 months now - can't complain one bit. Thanks Andy for offering us an amazing system for a fraction of a fraction of the price of others. Thank you.
Thanks Andy for the new pricing model for 'serious' users with the cap, now just for me to go about splitting up all of the projects I had crammed into one too hastily!
Disk Usage is something I'm completely fine with, and with the new cap on the user/spaces I don't need to worry about 'minor' hobby projects adding up and starting to take a big chunk out.
While this is my first time using an SVN service, the amount of communication you have with the customers is amazing, and I can't foresee myself leaving the service in the coming years :)
Andy, thank you very much for introducing the upper limit for the per-user fee. Now it really makes a lot of sense and will let me (with my private projects) and my company (with commercial projects) stay and promote Assembla among friends/clients :-)
There's still one issue mentioned that would be nice to solve (maybe it already is?). I want to give access to my space to my client and I want to pay for his account, so that it's seemless and as easy as possible for him. So basically I'd really appreciate a feature that lets me use my credit to pay for other account. Other than that I'm totally satisfied. Thanks again!
I want to be able to pay for my co-workers. It doesn't make sense that they pay their accounts, since this expenses must be covered by our company and not by themselves.
thinking it over and over again - I looked at my assembla spaces and half of the people are rather inactive, I just added them for monitoring, testing, knowing.
so what will soon happend - people will start creating shared email accounts and accessing the spaces through them.
assembla will not get money and working will become harder and more obtrusive.
The system already is set up so that you, the manager, pay for your team members and clients. At the end of the month, we bill the space owner who is the subscriber. We do not bill individual team members, and we do not ask them for payment information.
The system only asks for payment information when you create a space, or change the permission to private. Team members register for free, and we never ask them for payment information.
Hi, I am a faculty member at a university who teaches Game Development. I started using Assembla for my student projects this year as it provided us with excellent capabilities to manage projects, perform version control, and allow the instructors to help the students more easily.
I'm sure we would be able to find money in our budget for a University plan that would allow access to the service.
I would be more than willing to get this going as soon as possible. I have a large student project beginning in a couple weeks that I
would like to use Assembla for.
I could see a few options for payment:
(a) University wide annual plan - unlimited numbers of members but restricted to students
(b) Course-wide annual plan - enables the instructor to create the spaces and assign 4-5 members per space.
(c) student semester plan - enable the creation of 3-5 spaces per semester and can allow up to 5 members from the registered university to the space.
If you would like to work with us to make this happen, please contact me through email.
Thanks,
Andy,
Just to put in my two cents. I also have absolutely no problem paying; however, like others I have worries about charging "per user"
1) As a project manager, like others, I often invite people to the workspace sometimes just to take a look at the code or wiki pages. If they are inactive I usually remove them.
2) I think managers will eventually just create one account and just email people the username and password to get around paying for multiple users.
If there is a weakness in a system, it will be found and exploited (as you said, human nature).
You also mentioned that you think that charging per space would be too much for users. I respectfully disagree.
I would not mind at all paying $3 dollar per month per 100 MB. I think that could be a fair system. After all, the more space someone uses the greater cost to your company.
You said 45,000/50,000 projects are free accounts. I know this may not be possible due to competitive privacy, but can you give us (or even publish somewhere... which could in itself be a cool little stat feature on assembla):
* Average number of users per project
* Mean, medium, and mode space used per project. Or if possible, a graph or table showing in groups of 50 MB the number of projects using that amount of space. For example, 0-50MB: 15000 projects; 50-100MB: 12,000 projects; etc...
* Active user percentage (number of users who have logged in the past 2 weeks divided by the total number of users)
* Total page views per project
Having all this information, I'm sure the community and your company can think of a good solution.
However, as I mentioned before, I don't think charging per space instead of per user would distract users.
Also, if you consider advertisements... While many people may not use the web client, a LOT do. As Assembla grows so will this revenue stream.
Lastly Andy, I don't think you should consider a single dimension of revenue collection. Offer multiple plans (plans per space, plans per user) as well as showing text ads/adsense ads on open source/public spaces. You'll eventually find that one of those methods is more effective than the others and can shift your business strategy towards that; a form of business-oriented-ant-colony optimization on a P=NP problem =).
Well it was too good to last. The thing is that bandwidth is getting so cheap, and with dyndns ect.. it really isn't difficult to set up your own svn server w/ mantis and other tools. I guess I'll miss having the professional feel of Assembla, but we can't expect people to give us free stuff forever :) Thanks for the last yaer of free hosting assembla, and please do consider making a way for us to export all of our assembla stastics, logs, ect..
When I need features that I can't host on my own, I'll come back to here to buy my hosting.
Andy,
First, know that we have been admirers of Assembla and it has become the focus of our development activities for our research project. Also, know that we plan to make our efforts open source in a few months. But until that happens we want to keep our code under wraps.
I absolutely understand the need for you to sustain Assembla's progress by charging for some functionality and services. Since we love Assembla we will have no problems in making the small payments that you are placing on the services.
However, the way you are going about it seems a bit unfair to me. All those who signed up for the free service did so with the assumption that the same terms and conditions would apply as long as they met the conditions for such services. Changing the service conditions midway will cause problems for many underfunded/non-funded projects.
I suggest that you keep the same terms and conditions for those who have already signed for the free service.
As a way to increase your revenue, you can also market "buy one get one free" offer. This way the free project developers will help get some clients for you - hopefully fat ones.
Just my two cents! Keep up the good work.
Thanks,
Hemant
For whats its worth...
I have been a free assembla user for a few months and I fully support your decision to make it a fee-paying service.
At the end of the day, you have (HAVE!) to make this a sustainable business, and if that means charging a fee, then thats what you have to do.
I will support you with a commercial subscription.
Oh, and dont worry too much about the people that whine about wanting a free service...they are not the ones paying your bills at the end of each month.
For whats its worth...
I have been a free assembla user for a few months and I fully support your decision to make it a fee-paying service.
At the end of the day, you have (HAVE!) to make this a sustainable business, and if that means charging a fee, then thats what you have to do.
I will support you with a commercial subscription.
Oh, and dont worry too much about the people that whine about wanting a free service...they are not the ones paying your bills at the end of each month.
I have just started to do research on switching SVN hosting companies. See my blog post with reviews and research I've done on
Assembla SVN hosting alternatives Assembla, thanks for being free while it lasted, just wished I would have known you were planning on going paid when I signed up.
Jeremy Zerr
Hey,
First, I wanted to thank you...I just signed up about a month ago because I was incredibly impressed with your service.
I know this would be hard to regulate, but several software companies offer a certain license for "educational", "research", and "commercial", etc. Would a similar pricing system be a possibility here?
Basically, if you are going to make a profit off what is done using the system, you should have to pay a good deal of money (a commercial license). $X/company +$X/space, where X is a relatively large number. Of course, small companies won't be happy with this, but frankly, you are offering an awesome service that helps that small company out quite a bit. Yeah, they are cash strapped, but, so are you!
Also, if you a providing a service to a university, they should have to pay as well. It seems to me there are two cases: they use it for research, and they use it for classwork. For research, they should have to pay...that is what grants are for! For classes, it is a service they should provide the students, thus you are saving them time and money...colleges should have to pay for your service! Here, maybe $x/university+$x/space could work.
Maybe this could be based on expected use, perhaps restrict the total number of users, or maybe restricting total number of projects...whatever would work out best for you. But hearing college profs suggest that their students use assembla for free seems a little wrong.
Then, there are the nonprofits, tinkerers, hobbyists, etc. These would be the people who just want to use the features of the service, but don't really have the money to pay much (but I can imagine they would still be able to pay something). Maybe you could make the pricing for this category based on $x/administrator +$x/space (but allow unlimited projects within that space).
Naturally, this would be difficult to regulate, but any serious company or university would pay money rather than risk legal trouble.
Just a disclaimer: I am a MIT student, and I plan to use Assembla for the Battlecode 2009 competition, for 1 month in January. Naturally, I would love to just get one month of private free service, but I am perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price for one month, since this is such an awesome site.
Forgive me, my last post was unclear...$x/disk space, unlimited "spaces=projects" within that disk space.
Hey! $5 per month is not a lot of money, How much do you spend in beer? I like assembla and if i have to pay i will.
thanks to all
I did not get any message about converting my private space to public (from Assembla). You just did it. And it very suck. I realized it accidentally. Not happy with you :(
Kirill,
they didn't email me neither, i realized like you, accidentaly. They will do send the email someday, that is what this post says.
I suppose that they will give as a few weeks after that.
By the way, my friends and me were thinking to create our own svn server for personal use hehe :)
Kiril, you are wrong. We have not converted any private spaces to public. We are still supporting all private spaces. If you have a question about the permissioning, you can email me directly.
We will send an email message tomorrow, October 31. We have taken two weeks to understand all of the pricing questions, and make sure that we answer them in the email and on the upgrade forms.
This is better for you guys, because you will get more time before we apply some sort of read-only restriction to spaces that do not make a decision about subscribing.
Next week, we will release the redesigned subversion tool. It looks very nice. It might be a little bit more expensive than a Dreamhost account, but it will certainly be the best of breed.
Problem really existed.
How it was:
I found that wrongly commit confidential information in to snv. Then I tried to access it via web(different browser, never logged in to assembla with that, no cookies...etc..), as result I was able to open that file. Check also on another computer, same resut. I was sure that space was private, but I went to admin page to check for: what it had in "non-members access" and it was something like "read-only(view?)", then tried to switch to "none", but system did not allow( message was like: only paid service allows it, bla bla). Then I just downloaded my files and removed the space :).
We have NOT changed any of your space permission settings. If you set the public or "non member" permission to "View", then we will provide view permissions. That was the case here, Kirill. If you set non-member permissions to "none", then we will enforce that permission and non-members will not have access.
@Andy, I understand why you guys are doing this, and I support it. I enjoyed the free spaces while they lasted, but I like Assembla and I am not going to dump a great service just to save a pittance.
I will gladly pay the reasonable rates.
Guess it's time to move over to google code. Very, very disappointed.
Andy,
I see why you've gone down this route as it's profit that drives your business. However, for new user's signing up, they will at least have the option to make the decision of whether they would like to choose your company for the fees quoted. For us existing users, we didn't get that choice. Your existing user base, the ones who recommended you to others (and no doubt indirectly got other customers to sign up with you), are the only ones who have been punished by this strategy.
By going down this route, I feel you have probably alienated your existing customer base (or at least a fairly high percentage of it) and I expect there will no doubt be some bad publicity because of it. I'd urge you to rethink, or at least take into consideration, some of the comments here (such as the one at
"Saturday, October 18, 2008 5:58 AM by Jan" that suggested keeping your existing customers happy, and letting new users make their own minds up on what to do).
Thanks,
Mark
Thanks for keeping the open projects free, and I guess we can always self host of required.
I also look forward to the new web browsing svn client.
Anyway I spotted you said that svn comments are parsed for Tickets and I was recently surprised by the fact that the status of one of my tickets changed when i used a comment like 'fixed #22'. The problem was it should not have changed to status fixed but rather testing in my flow.
Anyway can you point me at the docs of what you parse as I can't find any.
@Mark Smith
I can't agree with you more. Yes, the service is great. Yes, it may be worth a fee. But no, we were not given a choice. And that's the major issue here.
We are nearing launch and moving systems is just not an option - for now. So we're forced to pay for a service we assumed was free when we signed up. Having a way to "grandfather" in existing users would have been a wise and conciliatory stance that would have saved some goodwill. A bad experience what resonates with me now when I discuss Assembla.
While users express surprise that people are upset about the charges, that they say are a mere "pittance", are sadly uninformed. In fact, Andy even wrote back to my last comment telling me to forgo an extra pizza for my team to pay for the monthly fees. What all of you fail to realize is that however small the fees, this puts us in an economically disadvantageous position to the one we were in yesterday. The costs of all of these "trivial" expenses add up. We aren't bootstrapping because we want to. We'd love to have funding. But it's just not possible. I'm working on this full time. I don't have an income. I'm sleeping on my friends couch - and have been for the last year. And you all want to tell me that these costs are trivial? Sure, they are to some of you... but not to all of us.
Steve, I agree that the "fixes #ticket" commands were poorly documented. We added a description of these commands to the trac/svn tab.
Mark, we will continue to support you. There will be no sudden cutoff. However, you should remember that Assembla is also boostrapped, and we also pay for all of these free services by working two jobs - plus supporting our families. There are significant costs to supporting the existing free user base - including the costs of support, midnight calls, hosting costs, and the cost of lost sales. So, we made the decision to treat everyone equally. This will cost everyone something, but it will lower the cost for all subscribers and improve the quality of service.
Dave, does Google code have a free private option? I do not think so. That is why so many people came to Assembla and took the free private repositories. It was not our original goal to take up the slack from Google. It was our goal to find a nice way to work with developers.
Stab in the back, now that we moved almost all of our projects to assembla. It is pretty good but definitely not worth the money.
@Vitalie Lazu, since you're giving up a pack of cigs and/or a beer, could you do the same for me? I live on a disability check that just barely covers my rent and meds. May I ask how I'm supposed to pay for this when I can't even afford food for myself? I spend most of my time volunteering for a number of churches and organizations around Charlotte. I also do coding projects for tips trying to make some money during the month. That five bucks you're looking at is 2-3 days worth of food for me. Am I supposed to give up meals for that time period? Sure you can live without your smokes. I'd rather not have to give up eating.
Thanks Assembla. I had been looking for another resource due to previous poor customer service from your company and not getting emails returned about the problem. Guess this was just the final straw for me.
@Andy, thanks I just spotted them ;-)
Eh-hmm I think I've just blown away my SVN repository for DKey and would appreciate a quick response on the forum.
There must be a ton of people bailing as I can't even run an export right now. It ust times out.
Steve, we do keep backups of the repositories, because we often take calls from people that want to get back deleted repositories. I will email you and find the repository name.
If this happens to anyone else - we need the repository name and/or URL to recover deletions.
Dr. Mike - I will check on the export horsepower This will always take a while if the repository is large.
Andy:
Thank you for keeping your fees reasonable. In reading some of the comments above it's amazing what people expect for FREE in our Web 2.0 world. I'd much rather pay the price of a few StarBucks mocha's a month than have to deal with a screenful of ads or have to admin our own svn setup AND know that some fellow developers are making a decent living Best of luck.
Andy:
First, thanks for the good service. Assembla made it possible for us to really get our project off the ground, and the trac system increased team communication and idea exchange by 3000 percent.
What exactly does "public" mean? Does it mean public SVN access? Can they see our trac?
I have no problem with people seeing our code, but downloading a half-finished product is not so good... even if we do intend to open our code upon release.
Andy, do whatever you think is good for your business. You're not running charity. There's always leechers who want everything as free. And the most amusing thing is, they don't care at all about you. See their comment, it is about them and not about how they can help you to get the service running. Go man, just ignore them, at the end of the day, you need to put food on your table.
It would be only fair that the new policy is applied to new projects. I really don;t know what to do now. Seems like a
BIG SCAM. Promising something for free and then once people get hooked you ask for money.
Andy:
When I thought the new pricing model was just a per-user subscription fee and paying for the disk space used I was completely fine with it - but having to pay for each user per space (granted, its capped) ruins the cost/benefit for small projects.
Why not extend your plans to 3 pricing models:
Public (free)
Private (pay for diskspace)
Private with Support (pay for diskspace and users)
Then you can also support those like myself (and a majority of the people commenting above) who like the outsourced trac/svn hosting but are now being scared off by the silly per-space pricing model. If support costs are such a big chunk of your costs then bill them as such - you have customers that will pay for the product, but that fee needs to fit with their usage - as you can see from these comments, there are a great deal of people that think its ridiculous.
Chris, like the other posters, you are asking to be charged only for disk space because you think it will be cheaper for you. However, you may be making a mistake. We looked at trying to support the service with disk space charges, but we decided it was not possible. Here is a summary of the analysis.
Our current disk space charges are calculated to pay only the costs of disk space and backup disk space (recent and long-term) and bandwidth for backups. They do not pay for software development, support, admin, or any other costs. So, they look cheap.
We found that most projects use only a small amount of disk space. Our application is not storage intensive. Most projects use under 100MB and pay the minimum storage charge of $0.30. Even if we have a large percentage of users signing up to pay this tiny amount, it still will not pay even the hosting bill. So, in reality, if we want to pay our costs with storage charges, we will need to charge a much higher price per gigabyte of storage.
It will not be much cheaper for you, and my users with serious projects that use more disk space will be VERY unhappy. The heavy disk users would be motivated to do silly things like remove all of the images from a repository. It is much smarter to charge $2 for a user that gets real value, than for a bunch of extra images.
We are not in the business of selling cheap disk space. Amazon, Dreamhost, and other high-volume hosting companies can sell disk space more efficiently, and they can do it in higher volume because they support storage-intensive applications like backup and video services. Storage based charges will only make a viable business model if you have a storage based application and get more than a trivial amount of money from storage charges.
Andy, could you explain what exactly "public" means?
"Public" means that you allw people who are not team members to see your space. This includes other assembla users and anonymous users.
You control this with the permission drop-down on the Admin panel that says "Non Member access". If this is set to "None", your space is private. If this is set to "View" or "Edit", your space is public.
OK, I see. Thanks. Last question: Does this affect the visibility of the Trac tickets, i.e. will others be able to read them? I guess not?
Most of my projects here are for the benefit of small non profit orgs, and are not open source (although some may be at some point). There is no budget for this I can promise. I'll have to look for something else...
Visibility controls affects all the tools of your space, including Trac.
Very disappointing, sad to see a great service consumed by money hungry hogs. Keep up the good work pickin' on the little guy. Time to move everything to my own server.
I don't get it. This was a great service and I brought several projects and colleagues here. There are loads of other free wiki/lighthouse/git services out there, so there's no incentive for us to stay. Assembla is a fantastic site, but my projects aren't private, so we're out of here.
Peter, if your projects aren't private, then Assembla's service is free.
There they go, the users you never wanted anyway ;)
Let me be more clear.
If your projects aren't private, then Assembla's service is free. What is your specific complaint about our model in this case?
The basic problem that we have is that the OTHER guys you refer to have very limited free private services. We ended up supporting everyone that was looking specifically for free - not a user base that can support the level of infrastructure our users as a whole deserve. So, by aligning Assembla with the industry standard - free public, paid private - we are working to get a better mix of people who are interested in a high quality paid service, as well as the free projects that we support. The free projects also get more support.
Andy,
The only problem is the feeling of bait-and-switch which we get by this move, which another commenter has also referred to.
We had this idea that all those who stayed within the 200 MB space would always get free service and Assembla would get its revenue from bigger projects.
Now, it seems midway you changed the rules.
As I have said before, I do agree that the charges you have proposed are reasonable and fortunately we are in a position to pay for the services. We are also quite happy with the service which makes it easy for us to shell out the money.
Sorry, my mistake, my projects _are_ private.
I repeat, Assembla is a great service, and I'm sure you have a lot of satisfied users. But I think the pricing model is incorrect. There are lots of free services out there, and the paid-for services have more bang for buck.
Basic, private hosting should be free, up to certain bandwidth and space limitations. Otherwise, your users may as well get a slicehost account and set up git, trac and dokuwiki themselves for $20 a month, with tons of bandwidth, virtually unlimited users and lots of storage thrown in.
Another one bites the dust.
So long Assembla, you -were- a great service now I'm moving everything outta here and not looking back.
Peter, now go and do the math: Choosing a hosting provider, installing and modifying all the tools you need, updating them every time a patch becomes available, developing your own version of a svn browser, unified account login system - this will cost you a lot more (in money and time - and time is money).
With Assembla you pay a little more than for your slice (or perhaps less if it's only you), but you get everything else for free. Not a that bad deal, isn't it?
What Andy and crew should have done is gone after those using the service so that users making a profit would have been the ones who had to pay. Andy mentions that up there himself. Instead he's gone after everybody.
I noticed that GMail was marking the sites email as spam as well. I didn't correct it.
Jan, I ask again. How am I supposed to pay for this? I get my webhosting for free as a trade off for services provided. I help the guys clients and he in turn helps me out.
The reduced features for private for free would have been a better route. I was never going to use 500 megs anyway.
And please stop going on about your "great" customer service. I found it rather lacking. I had issues that were never responded to.
And I never did get my backups. I finally gave up and deleted them.
Having our trac public is the killer argument against a public space. Our entire internal communication is in there. It's "open source", not "open developer".
@gb, hmm now that is interesting as IMHO there is much more to open source than just making the code available on a OSC approved licence. It's all about active community working on the code and that is largely the discussion on bugs. Otherwise it's just dead code and not an active open source project. My 2cs
There is much more than bugs in the trac. Also, we haven't released yet, we're an embryo if you will. And we have 4 team members who are actively working on the project, and anyone is invited to join. It's a game project, which involves much more than talking about bugs, as you can imagine. The majority of it is actually artwork and level design, not code. Artistic vision enters the picture (which is the most discussed topic in the trac, which we have found to be the perfect place for that). Bottom line, we're not in a released-and-bug-hunting-phase yet. If we were, I'd agree. Not all open source projects are equal. We're prepared to pay btw, that's not the issue. Maybe here, maybe elsewhere.
dead code No. An SVN repo isn't dead code. I'm only talking about trac here. It's our good right to keep our decision making process out of the public, and invite only the people who are interested or whom we are interested in. I thought that was common practice. Depends on how you use your trac I guess. Philosophical question.
As for the claim that Assembla is spam - We have sent 2 emails in the past six months, both this week. Our policy was to send no emails. However, When I first announced on the blog that we were changing our subscription plans, I received at least 20 complaints from users that wanted to be notified BY EMAIL. So, now we are sending a couple of emails. Clearly, Aseembla is NOT a spammer. Assembla has sent two emails in the past six months. I get more than that PER DAY from Yammer.
I have personally provided service to hundreds of people who called and emails. I can't recall receiving a call or an email from a jerk named Mike Wendell. We did develop a backlog of emails to info@assembla.com in August, because the volume of requests from free users grew too large. We provide this service, even though the free accounts - WHICH YOU, MIKE WENDELL, USE WITH NO POSITIVE CONTRIBUTION AND ONLY RUDE COMMENTS - are explicitly provided without any customer support.
Don't be a complete jerk. If you have any other issues with me, you can call me.
Thanks Andy. Thanks for proving you and your company lacks customer service. If you had asked, I would have been happy to point you to where my concerns had gone unanswered. I also point out that you asked to not be called an 'asshole.' I'm so glad you feel no restraint on name calling towards others. If you're not providing support, why have the support forums then?
I never said that Assembla was spam. Please reread how I and another poster stated that GMail was calling you a spammer.
Considering that I spend most of my day online making positive contributions to many open source projects, all you had to do was ask for assistance from me if you needed. I would have gladly found the time to do so.
All you've proven is you and your company's lack of customer service. I've been polite. Why can't you be, Andy?
Thanks for your rudeness. Thanks for proving that moving elsewhere is a good thing.
What's really sad is that six people emailed me to offer to pay for my account here. I'll pass on that.
I respond to every email and every phone call from every user that reaches me, free or not. Dr. Mike Wendell - given your position, and the fact that you won't tell me what the issue is, I am surprised at your own customer service policy, from your
own contact page, as copied below:
********************
Please note that I am NOT one of the WordPress.com admins nor one of the WordPress.org developers. *ANY* comment left requesting assistance with your blog will be deleted. That's not what this blog is for. The correct place to ask such questions is the support forums on WordPress.com.
Please also note that I do not do this to be mean or anything. I have my own webhosting company and I have to take care of my customers first. That's what they pay me for.
Please also don't email me for WordPress support. Again, not trying to be mean or anything. That's why they have the forums and the FAQ blog.
If you still want to email me about an issue with WordPress, you agree to pay me $85 via Paypal per question asked. This fee has been made since most folks are still going to email me anyway.
Suggestion: Please make this reply box bigger. It's a pain typing in such a small area. I'm actually having to write this in Wordpad and then copy and paste.
Andy, please get your stories straight. At no time did I tell you that I was not willing to discuss the issues I had raised previously. It appears you have a problem reading what folks are telling you.
For reference, here's what I wrote you in my last email:
"Andy, I'm not interested in dealing with you or your company anymore. I'm going to leave it at that."
I stated that I was no longer willing to deal with you and your company after you called me a jerk and sent me a highly insulting, nasty, and rude email. I will no longer deal with you as a client and I will encourage others not to do so either. As I noted previously, I would have been happy to bring those issues that got missed to your attention if you had asked. You chose instead of asking to throw insults at me. That request should have been in your first email. If customer support is so important to you, why wasn't the request in there?
As to the contact page, I've stated up above that I help with many Open Source projects. Wordpress, one that I used to assist with, is one that I no longer do so for personal reasons. Folks have continued to email me about it even though I've asked them not to. The fee, which I have never charged anyone for, is an attempt to get folks to go to the correct place for support. My blog isn't one of them. At last count, I still help over 2 dozen platforms. In fact, I still help folks for email me for WordPress support. I just ask them not to do so again.
Be calm man. Andy has his own reasons. Although some of us don't agree with him, we at least should support him.
Anyway, it's a bad new.
@db, we're going a bit off topic here but I guess I did not chose my words carefully enough. I believe you get the best from an open source development when a project is as open as it can be from as early a time in it's life cycle as possible. The more brains working on a project the better, and who knows who may drop by wit ha great insight or comment. I understand you may need to restrict access if you feel you need to keep market advantage.
I was using 'bug' in a generic way, for ticket and sort of assumed it covers any issue like feature request, docs, design discussions, and definitely not just code ... I know some projects don't like to track discussions on the tickets but I think it keeps everything in one place an in the open. as you say mostly a Philosophical question.
Out of interest when you say discuss on trac, do you use the wiki, the tickets or both for active discussion. I've done both before.
Well, it's been a nice ride. Thank you for free Assembla.
My real reason for writing this comment though is some advice for Andy. Don't ever ever ever engage in the sort of argumentative, irresponsible behavior you exhibited towards Dr. Mike in the previous few posts. It's not important whether he is right or wrong. What's important is how you run your company. And how people view the CEO and your company policies.
Posting personal comments about his activity off Assembla? Engaging in a tit for tat fight, in front of your community! I found that absolutely unacceptable, regardless of whose side I was taking.
If you want to run a successful company, you should learn to act the role of CEO. Hopefully this was a learning experience for you. Unfortunately - this was enough for me, and I'm sure others, to pack up shop. Best of luck.
Thanks for the update about the dissing of your customers.
It would have been nice if you gave us a link to backup our files in our accounts.
By the way, perhaps it would have been a good idea for you to start a conversation with your clients about this billing BEFORE the decision rather than just sending them an email telling them to move to unfuddle.
Like Marc, I hope this has been a learning experience for you.
You aren't going to lose your files. Everyone will have access to a complete backup before we restrict any access to free spaces, and any restriction will preserve read-only access.
We will support our users indefinitely even though you guys are scolding me on my own blog. I'll admit that I was cranky, tired, and hungry when I criticized Dr. Mike. However, I'm not going to apologize for defending Assembla. We've made a big investment over two years in servicing free users, and it's not right on any scale for them to get resentful because it became unsustainable.
Yes, I certainly have learned something. We have investigated many suggestions about pricing and packaging in depth. We have received requests for more frequent emails. Next time, I'm not going to respond to inflammatory bait.
Mostly, I am encouraged by the fact that we have thousands of new subscribers - far more numerically than the complainers. The new subscribers are more vocal and more demanding, which helps us in our product planning. Now we can escalate our efforts to make the subscribers happy, as well as provide improved quality for the free public services.