Why I've built an alternative to Github | Hacker News Reader

Why I've built an alternative to Github

blog.codeplane.com

473 pointsfnando192 comments

I don't understand this use case:

These projects are mainly side projects, or small freelance jobs I've done through the years, and I want to save them for posterity; who knows when I'll need them, right?

My solution to this problem is called tar. Just clone the Git repos to /tmp, tar up the results, and push the tarball to S3. Done. Archived for posterity for a few cents per month.

This isn't SVN anymore: It doesn't take special voodoo to host a repo. If nobody needs to push or pull from a repo, tar it up and archive it. If one person needs to push and pull from a repo, store it on that person's local hard drive (with backups, of course). If two people need to push and pull from a repo... Well, this is no longer an archive for posterity, this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?

this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?

This is the OP's complaint: once you're over 20 private repositories, you're paying $100/month. He wants stupid-simple, hosted, private git repositories, and lots of them. He probably ran a bunch of numbers on servers, storage, and bandwidth, and found that he run a simple, low-cost hosted git solution (without all the fancy web features) at a fraction the cost.

There was an opportunity in the market to make a simple, low-cost competitor to github, and he built it. Kudos.

Technically, yes.. waving your command line wand IS a solution. But also, technically, there isn't any reason why you shouldn't be able to keep 100+ small remote git repositories active for less than $100/month.

Also, Github doesn't require you to know how to use tar, S3, or have any other Linux experience. So why should this particular use case? Why wouldn't a business be able to cater to that market?

This is a business, and as such, should be measured as one. Why are we criticizing the "technical necessity" of the product? Are we under the impression that HN is the target audience?

> Github doesn't require you to know how to use tar ... or have any other Linux experience

You don't need tar to package a git versioned project.

All you need is some kind of zip program, and every major OS has one built in.

The difference knowledge it requires to just zip up a directory and send it in an email, versus running a github connection is so minimal its laughable that anyone suggests that you need some kind of web interface in order to unburden yourself.

> This is a business, and as such, should be measured as one.

I think that this is a solution chasing a problem. However, lets assume that it is a viable business.

The beauty of github was ease of sharing, and the web interface. If you take away the web interface and don't need to share then what's the value proposition here?

All you're getting out of this project is backups of your local git repo. And you know what.... tar is pretty damn competitive when it comes to that arena.

Doesn't "git bundle" already do exactly this?

Yes, you can zip up a repo easily. But where do you store it? Do you really want to save it in your email instead of saving it in some kind of source control so that you can use it as such if you need to quickly commit some change?

Saving it to S3 is an option, but then you have to create that account too. Why shouldn't you be able to just use one account?

Codespace is in the feature middle-ground between Github and a zipped backup.

It's online and active, but its a CLI only.

To match the functionality of Codespace, you don't need anything as inelegant as S3. If you have a dropbox account, you basically have the same functionality as Codespace offers. And its free.

And as a bonus, you can store other things in dropbox apart from your git repos.

Looking at Codespace, its targeting a space below Github that's already massively serviced by other simpler competition.

Edit:

Let me add. Before using Github, I personally would just open a network drive to my webhost, and save things on there. It was cheap. It was CLI. And as a benefit I could save other things apart from my code there.

If your goal is to have only one account, and you presumably also back things up that are not under version control (who doesn't?), then S3 is clearly the more appropriate route since it can do both.

Write down the steps required to merge changes from 5 different people using your method. Now what are the steps using something like github without the web interface?

There is a big difference.

> Write down the steps required to merge changes from 5 different people

This thread (and hence the comment) was about archiving a repository, not about merging it.

The original post was not about archiving only. To argue that archiving is easy, and ignore the other needs, seems to miss the point.

The killer feature of codeplane is cheap shared private git repositories. If you are the only person using your git repo, there is no reason you wouldn't store your remote on some random webhost (you can do this at http://nearlyfreespeech.net for essentially free).

If you want to collaborate with this setup, you would need to create a system-level account for every collaborator on your VPS (ugly) or install something like gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite).

The downside to gitolite is then you are running your own VPS, i.e. are responsible for security, updates, config, etc. It seems codeplane takes care of all the nonsense for you so you can get on with your real project.

As someone who had to set up gitolite because of this exact need, I can attest to the need for a service like codeplane.

I imagine part of the use case is "quickly and easily getting back to a snippet within one of those old files", in which case the tarball and archive method won't really work.

He's talking about tarring a local git repository. You can still use all the git history stuff, you're just backing up using tar rather than via git push/pull.

I keep a local copy of old git repos on my harddrive. I backup my harddrive religiously. Provided you don't have giant repos, this works well

I prefer to have my saved code at the ready, easily-browsable preferably via a browser-based colorized, tagged hubaju. I can appreciate this use case.

Sounds to me like a service that "archives" your github projects on to S3 and "activates it" back to github would be of particular interest.

While I do agree that Github leaves space for a model like this, I think the value of Github is that it offers a great community and awesome toolset (online and offline). Then I read this:

"I also wanted to do almost everything from my terminal, so I built a CLI, that you can use to manage repositories, public keys and collaborators. For daily usage, you probably won't have to go to our web interface ever again, and that's awesome!"

And I think "that's what I have with Gitosis on my VPS" (Gitosis uses git to manage user accounts and keys, so it pretty much doesn't get simpler than that). Companies pay for Github for the tools, developers who use CLI are probably not that interested in forking $9 a month for something they already have. Just my two cents, but I wish you the best of luck :)

I think it's a great idea. It would cost me more then $9/mo to setup a box(VPS). Not to mention the hour+ it would take to actually set it up(my time isn't free). Backup isn't a huge issue since it's git and presumably you have multiple devs and dev boxes with a copy of the code.

What might be even more useful and cheaper would be a reverse proxy service that allows you to share your local repo on the public internet. Like showoff.io for git.

The repo limit on github does seem a little bit silly. Limit by disk space makes much more sense.

I still use SVN for a lot of my own personal projects (don't judge me!) and sure I could setup my own SVN server no problem. But I pay a small fee ($50 a year I think.. or maybe $50/6-mos) for SVN hosting.

Same situation: I want private repo's. Past that, the only other thing I really want is not to have to worry about ANYTHING. It needs to be secure, backed-up, and quick, without me ever having to give it a 2nd thought.

For that, I'm happy to pay this small fee.

Why spend money with things like Bit Bucket around? It's a mercurial repo with free private hosting for up to 5 users.

Presumably, he doesn't want to use Mercurial.

Try out git-svn

Yeah! One can always set up the whole thing, but for small shops and freelancers it makes no sense to manage something like this.

Maybe for hackers like us... ;)

Who did your design? It's beautiful! Who does all these amazing designs?

In this case, I did my own design. I always liked design my own stuff. So, I spent only time on this one! ;)

It's brilliant, well done!

Sure, at least you take the worry of server management away, but I think your focus on CLI might not be well justified, as existing CLI tools are already very good and incredibly easy to set-up (aptitude install gitosis; git clone git@myserver.org:gitosis admin; done!) :)

You have to be a hacker to know how to host a repo now?

Getting a Git repo setup with a web accessible interface is not trivial and for the time spent doing it, you could be doing other things like ... you know ... writing code to make you money.

Gitweb is exceedingly simple to set up...

Gitolite/Gitosis/Gitweb and/or ssh access.

I could do it in ~5 minutes.

I could hack up an MVP of the features that Github has that I care about in maybe a weekend.

That said, I do use and love Github, but I use it for the network effects and general slickness.

If I need a private repo, I get off my fat ass and deploy it in less time than it takes to enter my billing address.

So could most of us, but then again you could do something interesting with your weekend instead.

The Github ruby gem ( https://github.com/defunkt/github-gem ) provides a nice command line interface to the Github API.

I just use bitbucket.org + Mercurial. More than enough for personal projects, or more, given that it's unlimited. The only limit is amount of users.

Switching to Hg was a bit of work, but I've actually learned to like it more than Git. Really though, it's the same kind of thing and I just use both. So I ended up at bitbucket for the same reasons OP built a new site.

My way was quicker though.

I use github for the network effects, but how does hg compare to git, speed-wise? I switched to git from bzr because bzr felt awesomely slow, although git is a real pain to use, even when you're familiar with it.

I understand that bzr and hg are almost identical, command-wise, but hg is about as fast as git, is that correct? What my workflow consists of is diffs/statuses/commits/pushes/pulls in projects with working trees of a few MB at most.

Hg is marginally slower, but not so you'd really notice. If you're crunching 20,000-line files on a regular basis it might be a concern. On repos of that size, I doubt you'd notice.

Git is a great tool for what it was built for and the group of users it was intended for--that is, rapid, tons-of-merges-and-pulls development on a gigantic codebase, for users for whom it is acceptable for man pages to serve as reminders rather than instructions. However, I appreciate the additional attention paid to tooling and user-friendliness in Mercurial-land that make it more pleasant for me to use.

The fact that all the tools can push to github make it easy to switch, which I just might do again. bzr was great, except for the fact that it just doesn't have that much traction...

I found bzr to be much as you described it - like hg, but slower. Nothing objectionable about the workflow (though the tools on Windows were very poor, I wasn't using Windows much at the time), just the perf on a particularly large chunk of code.

I don't have a large codebase to compare with honestly, plus since I'm working alone I don't generally have a lot of diffing/merging. But nothing I've done has had me saying "Boy that was slow," unlike something like Perforce, which is just slow. Always. Forever.

I've yet to find any significant speed difference between git and hg.

Hg is slower overall, but scales just as well as git. A huge repo will still be just slightly slower in hg than in git.

I thought so, thanks. Looks like I'll be switching, git is just too obtuse.

hg is slower, but still totally manageable

have you looked into something like http://hg-git.github.com/ ?

I agree. I would love to use github more but I want private repositories.

Yes, same. I love all the effort they've put in to the web front end, but I'm not interested in their pay plans for private repos, which to me, is just too damn expensive. $12 a month for github repos with five collaborators and a piddly disc space limit, whereas I get five collabs and unlimited disk on bitbucket.

His way is bringing in money.

I use bitbucket, too, because of the unlimited private repositories.

So wish I could use bitbucket, but switching off Git isn't an option for our team.

You can try hg-git[1] to keep using git, and then push to a hg repo[2].

[1]: http://hg-git.github.com/ [2]: http://traviscline.com/blog/2010/04/27/using-hg-git-to-work-...

I assume Bitbucket is free as Atlassian has deeper pockets.

You can set something like this up on any VPS with gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite) pretty easily. gitolite lets you set up very fine-grained per-user/repo/branch permissions, manage your users' SSH keys, and gives you nice clean git@git.you.com:repo-name access to your remotes.

I've done this for myself with a $48/year VPS from prgmr.com specifically because I needed more private repos than Github could offer (my setup instructions are here: https://gist.github.com/1035834).

Granted, if codeplane.com existed six months ago I probably wouldn't have bothered with gitolite. It appears they do nice things for you like backups.

...or gitosis http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-e...

Gitosis does not have as fine grained control as gitolite nor is it as well documented (config file errors are hard to debug), but it works well within its limitations. Both are now available as Debian/Ubuntu packages (gitolite was not when I started using gitosis). The other obvious difference is that gitolite is written in Perl and gitosis is written in Python. This should be a superficial difference, but sometimes the world isn't rational.

Gitolite is a fork of Gitosis that has been both improved and actively maintained. It even has a script to automate converting your old gitosis.conf to the new format.

One other thing to point out is that Gitosis is abandonware (last commit was made in September of 2009).

Gitolite on the otherhand is under active development, the documentation is great, and the author is generally available on the #git channel as are many other active users of the software.

Gitosis development is stone dead afaict. I would not suggest using it for new deploys.

Would there be a market for gitolite/gitosis hosting? Say, $1/mo for up to 1G of space, backed up, unlimited private/public repos, cli only, rudimentary web viewer for public repos via gitweb.

It's rather easy to set it up (as the comments here suggest), but seems like a lot of folks wouldn't want to go into trouble of learning about it and/or setting it all up properly, or don't have a server to put it on.

This is worth a try. Make sure you reach break even rapidly so you don't get stuck in burning money. If you already have a server available, then this is pure profit.

This is also a good opportunity to practice startup launching. Identify your target clients, where they are, what they are looking for, etc. Create a landing page with MVP offer description and subscription for availability notification. Check patio11's advices on optimizing the landing page. Then spread the word. The subscription feedback should give you a traction feedback. This should be enough to deduce the fee to reach break even as you launch. Assume only a percentage of subscribers will make the jump. If you can break even with only 10% subscribers adopting it, then things are sound.

Gitolite suffers from being well documented for an open source project yet still very hard to understand from a standing start - it's just not a very intuitive setup. I wrote a post on setting it up just to help me wrap my head around it.

http://www.exratione.com/2011/03/setting-up-an-access-contro...

Since I maintain my own sites anyway, keeping as many private repositories as I want is basically free once this is set up.

And setup consists of:

    sudo aptitude install gitolite

I do this (also on prgmr) and manage backups with tarsnap+cron which with all my small repos costs nearly nothing even if I don't clean up old tarsnap archives.

I run a services company. I am near my limit for 125 private projects with mega plan.

I have 100+ private repositories,with about 100 collaborators(many are my clients) and consume just 2.3 gb and pay 100$/month, about 15-20 of the projects are live/active, others are projects which have been delivered or on hold.

Organization as a concept was brought pretty recently on github, my account dates 2008, charging double for just that is not attractive.

I love github, they are coming with awesome features, but in terms of certain features many service firms need, a way to archive the project not counting them for active projects. github is lacking. instead of doubling the service plan every 6-9 months I am willing to give the competing git hosting services a try

From another perspective, Heroku has unlimited free git hosting that happens to optionally serve webapps.

GitHub is also a free hosting service for static websites, that happens to optionally host git projects :)

Github's pricing model really is a painpoint for little consulting shops. We drive next to no traffic and storage on there, but we do a few projects every quarter. Haven't quite outgrown our paid plan yet, but we will in a bit.

Just wish Github would revise their pricing to support peeps like us, I hate to use different interfaces. May choose to just archive things to codeplane until then, keeping things we are actively developing on github.

Try unfuddle, their hosting includes both svn and git ... doesn't have most of the thrills and spills of github but I find their pricing very reasonable.

Same feature set as http://repositoryhosting.com with a higher price point (they're at $6/month now for 2GB). They don't have a CLI or anything as far as I know but they do offer more storage space at $1/GB/month which is pretty nice if you just need a little extra.

+1 for RH. They are awesome and I couldn't be happier. I've never had problems except when AWS went down.

Also, they offer git, mercurial and SVN.

Have been using these guys for a year or more now, at 3 different companies. Amazingly responsive support. Best thing I've ever spent 6 bucks on.

RH is awesome. We eventually switched to Unfuddle for the time tracking, but Repository Hosting is still one of the best deals available, IMHO.

And you get trac for free.

I think CodePlane is very cool, but it seems to solve a different problem than the one advertised on the blog.

To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it.

On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks.

I love to see projects like this. I hope it gains some traction and forces Github to change their business model to a more manageable per-GB price.

The one-repo-for-old-projects solution works in some cases, but not really for mine. As a contract developer I often have projects that are under active development for a few months and then go into "maintenance mode". In this case I want separate repos for when maintenance needs to happen. Otherwise that one repo is a mess.

I believe this is the kind of problem that CodePlane solves. And I agree with you that its great to see projects like this present competition and make GitHub better in the long run.

It's a hack of course, but if the changes are really that occasional, the pain is negligible: all you need to do is to commit twice for every project change (once for a sub-directory containing the project repo, once for the root repo).

If a project becomes active again, simply take it out of the master repo and push it as a new repo.

It's really not that bad. But then again, things change if you have collaborators...

Can't you just use branches for this? Sugar code (git.sugarlabs.org) generally gets a new branch for each major release, which can be maintained separately from master.

I like this business model better. You pay for what you use, not how you use it. Its moving away from the Microsoft plan of "to use this for business you must pay me double".

Its like a ford salesman asking you about how you plan on using your ford focus, oh you will be driving to work? Highway driving costs you 50% extra. Sorry. You can take our back-alley car for cheap though.

as arturadib mentioned, you can make the "old-projects" repo. But that's just a hack/workaround for a wrong business model. Though I am sure this business model is much more profitable.

I wanted to solve both problems. I have 40+ repos, but about 50% are archives only. So, with 2GB I can store them and I also work on my current projects.

It's Mercurial, not git, but bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories: https://bitbucket.org/plans

What does the UI actually look like? Is it just the list of repositories? I'd be more likely to spend money if there was a tour, or an example project I could look at, or an annotated example session with the CLI tool.

Yeah, I'm working on it! Just had to do some things first before really working on "selling the product".

Yep, before I would even consider paying I want to see the docs for the command line tool, and at least a few screenshots of the web interface!

I does look good from what info is available though.

This is a very desirable use case. For those who don't get it, I'd say the following:

- it's nice to use git for all the small side projects one creates, but putting all of them on github is crazy expensive if you like keeping your musings private (though not necessarily b/c you're committed to a closed source ideology :)

- the cost factor creates an incentive to misuse git (not using submodules where appropriate) just to save money.

- There are a lot of awesome Git UI programs that run locally on my laptop, gitk is one.

- FWIW his fills the niche between github and gist.

Your first two reasons, and liking hg, is why I prefer bitbucket.

Maybe I'm not fully understanding this.. If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.

> If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.

Private code sharing. You have to install something like gitolite (see my other comment) to do private code sharing with git on a VPS, or you'd have to create a system-level user for every person you want to share code with.

Webfaction actually allows you to create a git repo with web interface that can be shared privately.

It is one of their "one-click" installations and I have been pretty happy with it for my limited use.

I know I don't need a web interface, at the same time I know people that loves and only uses the UI. Why not solving this specific problem and still making all other users happy?

Makes sense?

$9 vs $20?

linode is expensive, you can find some cheap vps for less than 10$

or you can pay the dude the $9 and have your problem solved quickly and easily

I am currently frustrated with Github's private repository hosting plans. When I switched from SVN to Git, what was initially one repository became six, because of Git's "you can't checkout part of a repo" philosophy. So now, I have to buy a fairly expensive plan even though my usage is pretty small.

Cheers, to you for adding some competition to the marketplace. I hope it provides some pricing pressure on Github one of these days.

I find $12 a month to be really cheap.

And it is, if you somehow have less than 10 private repos. I personally have over 25, and our group has over 50...putting us in the $100/month range

Anyone else happy with Assembla? 2GB, unlimited repos and users, source browser, etc.: http://offers.assembla.com/free-git-hosting/

Ah, there is some fine print:

> Please note: While we do not guarantee our free services, we do want to build a long-term relationship with you. So, even if you sign up today for a free plan, and we discontinue that plan, we provide service for at least a year after you sign up. We will add and remove our Free offers to meet customer demand. Enjoy what we have posted today, and check back regularly for additional offerings!

The UI at Assembla is awkward to work with. I participated in a project that used Assembla, and I kept getting a flood of emails attached to tasks and revisions that I didn't want to follow.

You can change the email notifications, BUT:

I couldn't find it for 5 minutes!

A similar thing happened to me a few weeks ago when I was looking for a way to add more repositories to a project. Luckily I got an answer quickly on their support forum (and yes, it was there).

So yes, the UI and information hierarchy is lacking, but ultimately it can do a lot of things.

(For future reference, you can change the settings under Stream - Email Notifications).

Assembla is not really a GIT hosting, it's project management with repos. You can use tickets, wiki, internal forum, GIT/Mercurial/SVN repos and some build/deploy tools.

Admittedly some of their tools have small problems, but the team is responsive and improves it steadily.

I've used one of their paid programs for everything we do (must be about two years by now) and I would recommend it.

Assembla doesn't seem to have that social aspect like Github, but I find their combination of tickets, wiki, forum and repos more useful.

I have been using Assembla for over a year now for all my projects, and I have been very happy with it and recommend it to everyone.

Been using then to host my small personal projects for a year or two (using their SVN repo). So far, so good (so free too).

I hadn't gotten around to commenting, and I'm glad it took me a while, because while I first went to Codeplane and set up a trial account, pushed my Github private repos therem and downgraded my account from a paid to an unpaid account — thereby netting myself a free cheap beer a month — I went on to read some of the comments here, set up gitosis, and am now free of any sort of paid git hosting fees beyond my existing Linode virtualized server — upgrading my free monthly drink from a PBR to a Hendrick's martini.

Thank you, fellow Hacker News citizens.

Good for you for building this and then charging for it. There certainly is a place in the market for what you are doing and the price you are doing it.

Good job.

Thanks! ;)

I too wish you luck!

What about security? If i sign up, is my code safe if I want to keep a repo only for me?

I can say that's is pretty safe. Backup is not an issue: copies of all repositories are stored on S3, CloudFiles and Linode's backup solution. People can't access your repos, unless you allow them to.

I've always wondered about this. The real expenses are disk space and bandwidth. I don't understand how they can't just provide a space-based plan (oh yeah, that would cut into high margins).

It's a wonderful service and they've done so much to keep many open source projects from stagnating. They outshine SourceForge and Google Code by a large margin. Still, if BitBucket was git, I might migrate my stuff.

The thing is "social coding" isn't that big of a plus for your own private stuff. I definitely see value in a service like this.

Is it really necessary to disguise a Linode referrer link using bit.ly in the homepage? I would be more inclined to click it if it wasn't masked...

I just wanted to see how many clicks that would have, but you're right. Just removed the link since I just don't care. ;)

You might be able to do a quick happy medium by generating a "vanity url" such as bit.ly/sneaky-affiliate-link or something.

Or perhaps a sneaky bit of javascript to track click events on that link via ajax.

I REALLY don't think that github's plan is unreasonable. I pay for it quite happily. But good on you for DOING something about how you felt

for updated-infrequently-if-ever repos, github's pricing doesn't make a lot of sense. i have plenty of small, one-off repos i'd love to back up on github but it doesn't make sense for me to upgrade plans for them.

i just back up to multiple boxes, but i can understand why someone would want something centralized and specific.

I agree. My small company has many 1-2 week dev efforts that we'd like to have on GitHub but simply can't afford it. I've tried creating a "small project" repository and using different branches to host the different projects but am definitely not satisified. GitHub NEEDS a size-limited hosting plan.

As soon as GitHub introduces size-limited plans, will Codeplane be able to attract new customers?

Your blogpost mentioned using Git with Dropbox was too much of a hassle, could you elaborate why? I want to know since all my private repos are `git init --bare` within Dropbox directory, which works very well so far. What's the main benefit if I were to switch to Codeplane?

My problem with Dropbox was when I had to share a repo with someone. How to do that? I created a shared folder. And then it becomes really hard to manage all this stuff. For 1-person usage, Dropbox works really great.

The "one price" is an awesome feature for indie developers and small companies.

Looks like a more polished version of http://repositoryhosting.com, which I'm using at the moment. Will definitely give this a try!

The title of the page at www.codeplane.com is "Unlimited private Git hosting", yet it appears that you are limited to 2GB of repositories for your $9/month.

How is this unlimited? Are there other plans that you can sign up for? If so they seem impossible to find on the site.

I think he's referring to the absence of a limit on the actual number of repos, which is only bound by the space given. If you can git 1000 repos in there, good for you, he doesn't care.

Granted, something like "2GB private git hosting" might be more accurate.

Yeah, it's always hard when people say "unlimited". Here I believe they mean unlimited users and unlimited repositories within the 2GB.

Maybe putting something like "(Virtually) Unlimited private Git hosting"?

Fog Creek has a product called Kiln, which is like Github, but is based on Mercurial. It's very polished and has lots of great features that focus on private repository management (but has public repos, too).

It's free for up to 2 users. Unlimited repos and disk space.

And then it's $25/user/month!!!

Yes, but if you're solo freelancer or student, you can't beat it.

I think that anyone who complains about GitHub's price has gotten way too spoiled, or perhaps underestimates the amount of effort required to maintain a service of that quality and reliability. I find this to be another symptom of HN tunnel vision.

I don't think anybody is "complaining about GitHub's prices" per se...at least not the way you are implying. That is, I don't think anyone is saying GitHub is greedy, or not worth it ever or something like that....

However, the fact of the matter is they have a particular pricing plan, and that pricing plan is such that for certain people it becomes not worth it.

When you go to a fast food place, they generally offer you varying sizes of soda.

For most people that's fine....but for some people their needs may fall JUST in between two sizes...for example they want more soda than a medium, but they don't really need a large.

So they start buying a large...because that's a reasonable compromise.

Sure, the large may be a very good deal, but that's completely besides the point. It's more soda than they really need, and they are wasting money by buying it.

When someone offers a size of soda that happens to fit their needs exactly, there's no reason they shouldn't switch to that. If their needs change they can always go back to their old size, or even a newer one.

Or to pick another soda analogy, imagine that the fast food place only charges for the soda cup. It's a dollar a cup for everyone. This is a GREAT deal for most people...they come in pay a dollar and get a cup of soda, with free refills. The fast food place does alright because it all balances out in the end, the people who drink a little soda subsidize the ones who drink a lot. Even people who only drink one cup of soda get a reasonable deal.

Now imagine you come in with 100 kids who only need a thimble-full of soda each (for the sake of argument). You're paying 100$ for the amount of soda everyone else is paying 1$ for! Overall, the pricing plan is reasonable...but for certain people it falls apart.

Why should those people go with a deal that doesn't work for them? It's better all around for them to find a better fit.

The fact that github is awesome and a great deal is completely irrelevant re the issue at hand. The point is some people don't need all the github awesomeness, they just want somewhere to stick their code.

If that's all you need, there's no reason at all not to go with a cheaper option.

That's not to say that the cheaper option is this guy's service....it could be any number of things. For some people this codeplane is a good fit, for others...not.

"Sure, the large may be a very good deal, but that's completely besides the point. It's more soda than they really need, and they are wasting money by buying it."

You actually put your finger right on the fallacy. It feels that you're wasting money by buying a GitHub account with 100 private repos when your repos are largely inactive. But the way to make smart economic decisions is not by measuring hypothetical waste (i.e. how much of the account you are using) but by comparing the options side by side. You pay more for GitHub, yes, and you pay for stuff you might not use, but if it saves you a few hours per month then it's a better choice than going for a service like CodePlane.

>, but if it saves you a few hours per month then it's a better choice than going for a service like CodePlane.

...and that's the hole in your reasoning. That is not a forgone conclusion at all...in fact it's a non-sequiter.

In the analogy these people aren't getting ANYTHING for paying the 1$ per cup (vs paying 50 cents for the actual soda used)...there is a theoretical benefit of free refills, or it being a reasonable price for the cup of soda...and for the people who use it, it's great.

...but the whole entire premise of this discussion is that for some people that's no benefit at all since they're not using it.

We've already eliminated all the people who are getting their money's worth out of Github, that's the premise of the conversation....we're talking about a service that is designed to cater to people for whom Github's pricing plan doesn't work for their needs.

Additionally, to argue that these people don't exist is a specious argument. I think it's an incredibly dubious proposition that there is ANY service which precisely fits the needs of it's entire target market.

>. But the way to make smart economic decisions is not by measuring hypothetical waste (i.e. how much of the account you are using) but by comparing the options side by side

Yes, precisely.

You make smart decision by weighing your own personal needs against your options. Everyone has different needs, and while Github works for many people, it does not work for everyone.

Again, I'm not prepared to say codeplane represents a solution for all these people...many will simply go to bit-bucket, handle it themselves, etc... but I think it works for at least some of them.

Nobody says that! I love Github. I used to have a paid account. I still have 100+ repositories in there. I just can't afford Github for my private repositories, which I think it's not for me anymore.

If you've got 40 private repos, I assume you're at the very least a moderately experienced professional programmer. Let's say for the sake of a figure that you charge a low price of $50 per hour. So buying a GitHub Gold account is like two hours of extra work per month for you, and you'll probably have to spend more than that on CodePlane (as a user, not developer) because it's simply not as battle-tested and extensive as GitHub. So I don't think it's worth it.

You're reading a lot into one assumption you've made. I'm a grad student. I try out lots of little things. I want to keep them, but I don't want them just on my hard drive (I like them to be available on the Internets).

GitHub forces me to open-source those small projects, and I'm usually fine with this, but lots of other people aren't. And if he can offer it for $9, then why shouldn't he? Your complaint is that his potential customers should pay more, because you think GitHub has better features, which he may or may not need. That doesn't make any sense. Having different offers and different price points makes sense, so I really don't see why you are knocking the OP for making something that fits his (and presumably others) needs.

"I really don't see why you are knocking the OP for making something that fits his (and presumably others) needs."

I'm making the case that it doesn't fit his needs, since his reluctance of paying the GitHub price is an example of this:

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

I don't see the parallel. Quite the opposite; he's displeased with what he sees as GitHub's high price for their lowest-tier paid account, and developed an alternative that costs less and offers more of the "bare bones" stuff (more space, unlimited private repos) instead of focusing on the higher-level collaboration tools and web interfaces.

How does a reference to someone finding little friction to paying multiple tens to hundreds of dollars for things while cringing at a 99-cent expenditure have anything to do with this?

GitHub bothers me, to be honest. I read a lot lately about how many people are using GitHub as a sort of "programmer's portfolio", and, more importantly, how many startups are asking for your GitHub URL as a part of your resume package. As if how many active repos on GitHub you have is some sort of even remotely useful metric as to how good a programmer you are. There's a lot of pressure to have a strong presence on GitHub, while their product offering doesn't seem to meet the needs of a lot of people. Not to mention there's tons of talent that uses hg or bzr as their VCS of choice; nobody asks for your bitbucket or launchpad URL.

"[...] he's displeased with what he sees as GitHub's high price for their lowest-tier paid account [...]"

And I'm arguing that his displeasure with GitHub's price comes from the fact that he's underestimating the extra amount of time he will have to spend as a user of CodePlane because CodePlane is not remotely as polished as GitHub. I'm arguing that this extra amount of time will not be worth the difference in price.

"[...] developed an alternative that costs less and offers more of the "bare bones" stuff (more space, unlimited private repos) instead of focusing on the higher-level collaboration tools and web interfaces. [...]"

It's not just collaboration and web stuff, it's reliability and security. Would you seriously trust a tiny service like CodePlane to store your code? Both ensuring it won't be deleted and that it won't be hacked into? If DropBox has trouble with those issues, would you trust a low-budget one-man-operation with your 50 repos?

"[...] There's a lot of pressure to have a strong presence on GitHub [...]"

When people evaluate programmers they often have to rely on far-from-perfect metrics, like university credentials. Putting emphasis on GitHub and ignoring the other forges is not ideal, but it's such a big improvement over the old ways. It's hard to get new metrics accepted into the mainstream.

Yes, I get that. I just don't agree, and presumably he doesn't either.

And GitHub started as... what, exactly? A tiny low-budget one-man operation? Everybody's gotta start somewhere. Maybe CodePlane doesn't meet your reliability and security requirements today, but there's nothing saying it won't in 3-6 months.

And regardless, this is Git we're talking about. Every repository clone is a full backup. If you're still concerned, add a post-commit hook that also pushes to another server you control, or set up a cron job that does rsync every now and then. I'd do the exact same thing on GitHub as well -- why would you trust GitHub to never have an issue that might render their backups useless? It's certainly not the first time this has happened to a service that does their own backups. If there's data you really care about, you must maintain your own backups. At the very least use an online backup solution (or something like Dropbox). Maybe not something you control, but at least it's pretty unlikely that both services would fail at the same time.

Yeah, that's true. That was more of a mini-rant on my part than an endorsement of anything non-GitHub.

Well said sir/madam.. well said

bitch, please. let the good man have his time building an app. be openminded. otherwise we would be discussing launchpad and sourceforge yet.

...and now you are reading into what you think people's spending habits are, based on an Oatmeal comic?

What's your problem?

"What's your problem?"

I'm curious about the OP's logic. I believe I found a hole in it and I'm curious whether I have made a mistake or he did, and I'll be happy if he'll point out my mistake if I have one.

I'm a moderately experienced professional developer. That in no way means that I'm going to pay money for Github, a less-valuable service compared to one that has all the features I regularly use* that I get for free from somebody else.

Also, git annoys me. Thus, Bitbucket, and life is good.

* - Which is to say, source/diff browsing, a markdown-based wiki for some projects, and that's it. Github has a lot of features, but it also has a lot of completely useless features.

It's probably a great price for most dev shops but leaves a gaping hole for companies who have many small projects.

Bitbucket somehow manages to maintain a service of similar or greater quality or reliability and has free unlimited private repos. Github is charging more because they can, not because it costs that much to maintain.

People who think that Bitbucket is on par with GitHub are the same kind of people who said that StackOverflow could be cloned in a week. You focus on features but fail to see all the painstaking attention to detail that went into creating these sites.

IF you use the web-interface consistently. If you don't use the web interface much, or use it for simple text diffs, bitbucket is perfectly viable.

One funny thing about github is they put so much effort in to being able to diff images and other files, yet their space limits are too low for private repos, if you are versioning anything other than just text files.

All of GitHub's space limits are soft limits to prevent abuse.

Hmm. Why is it necessary to overly generalize and disparage folks who don't seem to think precisely the way you think in order to make a point?

One plan, one price seems like a good tagline, but what if a user needs more than 2GB? I guess you'll want to charge them more money for more space, and eventually will have more plans, or will charge per GB?

Btw, I like both the idea and execution. Good luck... :)

Yeah, There will be a way for buying additional storage. You'll by a whole GB. Don't want to have different plans, though.

http://blog.codeplane.com/

I configured a Git server on my EC2 micro-instance and just use that.

I was a paying GitHub customer until I decided that I spent too much money on online subscriptions. But when I'll pay for a Git hosting service again, I'm going back to GitHub, as I'm still a happy user of their free account. GitHub rocks.

Sure, competition is good, but I don't get what codeplane.com is offering, considering that configuring your own in-the-cloud repository is so easy on a VPS (that you're likely to have anyway and be left unused to its full potential otherwise).

Must admit I do like the price.

I like the idea. If there is a niche for a git hosting alternative, you guys have found it at the right time. I wish you all the best.

Thanks! ;)

I'm using codeplane for quite a month ... it's really good.

I think the only thing i will miss from github, is the feature to view your code online.

how do these startups get beautiful page designs? hiring those level of designers would require lots of $$ if you ask me.

Actually, I did it by myself. I have a BS, but I always liked design and I've being doing my own designs through the years! ;)

It is stunningly beautiful. Can you sell it as a theme, on Themeforest? say?

I don't think I wanna do that! :)

Here's one way: http://themeforest.net/

It's not just the blog, but the main page layout and graphical assets look great too, and doesn't seem to be some 3rd party theme.

Interesting; I actually have an Github organization account for my company but I could definitely see myself using that service. I could easily Gitosis or Gitolite on one of my instances but tend to prefer focusing our sysadmin man power on our products and clients.

Thanks for building a low cost alternative.

Here is my advice. What github looks charming to me is the wonderful service for free plan users. I think this is wise, build a huge audience, and then "out-teach" them to be their potential customer. Success comes after the fame.

I don't get it, why is setting up a private git repository on your own server a hassle?

Assuming you have ssh access (compacted for clarity):

  ssh server "git init --bare repo/project.git"
  git clone server:repo/project.git

Am I missing something?

EDIT: mkdir superfluous

That doesn't handle the multi-user authentication/authorisation.

Yes it does, however it doesn't provide granularity for multiple users of the same server, and unless you go for vanilla could be troublesome to customize through something like pam. I simply commented on the non-issue with creating private repositories.

A service like this is nice if you don't have the ability or time to setup your own environments, but in my opinion could be risking a very slim user scenario.

I just use Assembla for "dead" projects. Unlimited free Git repos, as long as you don't need any of the fancy management stuff: http://offers.assembla.com/free-git-repo/

Great looking product and very much like your way of thinking in assigning space and not a set number of repos. I'm a github user and have been for a while but such competition would make me reconsider in the future. best of luck with it.

The Github price structure might not be the best for this use case. But Github is simply the best to manage your repo's, I don't think this is going to change anytime soon.

It might be a better idea for Github to allow projects to be archived.

I think this site is better value: http://www.svnrepository.com

However you may well have something on the keeping it simpler approach.

I'm very happy that more people are going to compete with github :)

I use rsync.net with git: http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/02/git-and-subvers...

Works pretty well.

More screenshots of the web interface (or a walkthrough video) would be nice.

(honestly afraid to comment, but what the hell.)

i know its not git, but bitbucket (mercurial, same type of dvcs as github) has free private and unlimited repository hosting.

I would make the dotted homepage background a little fainter. It makes the text a little hard to read and I find myself squinting.

I like repositoryhosting.com for 6$/month you get unlimited users/repositories and support for git, svn, hg

There is http://xp-dev.com for unlimited repos as well

Bitbucket offers unlimited numbers of repos for free (they only care about number of committers).

please note: slsapp.com already has features you ask for. You have lots of archive repos. You are allowed (even on free account) unlimited view-only repositories and they charge mainly by space/active repos.

However I still see the value in this service, and I like it.

Just curious... are you brazilian?

Yes, I am! :D

Yeap

I liked that I dont need to do this setup myself and that I can integrate with S3.

Exactly my point! People can always set up their own stuff. The question is "is it worth?"

http://www.gitorious.org/

Gitorious is both a free site and an open sourced project web app. Strange this hasn't been mentioned before in this thread.

Is there a way to link this with a project management tool like basecamp?

Not yet! Basecamp and some others tools like Pivotal Tracker will be integrated at the right time. ;)

Git is simple enough to set up with some basic unix skills and with something like gitosis you can manage access to repos. GitHub has added many more features and make collaborating super simple. Totally worth it IMHO. Git is not just Github though.

Great idea, well executed - im sure you will do well!

Really beautiful and easy to use. Very impressed!

fyi - it's already been done few years ago, http://repositoryhosting.com/

30 day trial for a long term usage pattern?

give me free accounts with a few MBs and you have yourself a user base.

github didnt get that size with 9/mo plans...

If your developers are spending more than 5 minutes a month managing, monitoring and looking after their repositories then you are doing it wrong.

Github's monthly fees are so much cheaper than the cost of your developers time and happiness.

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