Bushido (YC S11): An App Store For The Web That Can Kickstart Your Side Projects

In the meantime, we're launching Bushido as a really simple way to launch Open-source rails apps with one click, a unified log-in system, and premium hosting. We do a revenue share with the developers, so all you do is write the app, put up a link that has the url to your rails' app git repo, which branch to deploy from, and any environmental variables you want the app to launch with (so you can customize it at launch time), and then anyone can instantly launch the app. If they end up converting to premium hosting (based on a few factors like number of allowed user signins and apps), we'll split the revenue with you.

The goal is to help developers be more and more independent working on their projects of passion, and to app users way more choice in the apps they can use.

Let me know if you have any more questions, s@gobushido.com!

I can take Jason Kincaid's word for it and sign up, or Bushido can actually tell me something, anything, about what it is.

Jason's article does indicate they could be on to something interesting, though.

Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :)

Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)!

Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.

I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.

And yeah, there are a handful of SaaS products that are open-sourced, but most aren't maintained to a high-enough quality for our tastes. We'll work with developers to up the standard.

Example: Mockr (https://github.com/causes/mockr-old). A sweet app that lets you share and review designs among teams (and as per last check, it was unmaintained). We ported it to Bushido with a few extra lines of code and it's here https://github.com/HashNuke/mockr

If you have apps like these, that you think others would find useful, mail me (akash@gobushido.com) and I'll help you with porting it to Bushido. And if you are using Devise for auth, we have a plugin and it's 5 lines of code promise! Most apps that we've ported, we've ensured that they work fine outside of Bushido too (opensource is giving back. right? :)

You don't have to wait. Just get back to me at akash@gobushido.com and I'll help you port your Rails apps to Bushido. Bonus points if you are using Devise coz we have a plugin for it that makes it so much easier.

Something that's been under discussion for a while at Bushido.

Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app?

No. Each instance of an app runs in it's own sandboxed environment. That helps you keep your app simple and not worry about scaling for those 10k users. If you want a simpler perspective to look at the service - it sort of provides web apps like mobile apps. Separate instances like how they run on your phone. So tomorrow if there's an online editor app (like Google Docs. Just saying...) on Bushido and you have a Chromebook-like device, you can launch your own instance and that'll all be yours like a separate app. Once there's support for more platforms it'll be easier to see it as "app store for the web". All apps on the web and all you do is launch an instance of apps for yourself.

P.S: I work for Bushido