Comment by jwmcglynn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwmcglynn | Hacker News Reader

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I am one of the few people who used the open source version and really liked it, and I'm disappointed by the changes.

The challenge I had with Sourcegraph is that it's out of reach of developers working on personal projects. There isn't a hosted plan, and for my projects I can't easily open source them due to my employer.

I was really excited when the Sourcegraph App was released, since it allowed me to give Sourcegraph a try on my project without going through the complex self-hosted setup. I went as far as getting scip-clang working with my Bazel-based project, and then tried out the docker-compose setup on my home lab.

Now that code search was removed from the app, and this change, I'm concerned that I won't be able to use Sourcegraph for my personal projects in the future.

This is a missed opportunity. I think individual developers using products for personal projects are powerful advocates, since those developers may convince their employer to purchase the product. If I could I'd gladly pay, but I'm just one person and can't justify $5k/year.

Hi there, Sourcegraph CTO here. Code search remains free for individual devs, and I hope you'll continue using us for your projects! https://about.sourcegraph.com/code-search/pricing

We have lots to reflect on given the feedback here on HN. We were honestly a bit blindsided by the number of people who appear to be using open source Sourcegraph, or who really wanted to use it but found the process too difficult. Part of this is because we had a zero telemetry policy for the open source distribution. Perhaps that was a mistake in hindsight, but introducing telemetry there would've been another can of worms!

Now that the usage is more visible, it's actually kicked off a lively internal discussion. We're going to take some time to gauge the size of the user community and figure how we can best support it. Aside from individual use being free (still the case) and making deployment more straightforward (through something like code search in App), are there other things we can do to make it easier to adopt? Sorry about the confusion here, we should have handled this better. But the silver lining is we realized there were a lot of users of Sourcegraph that we didn't know about and we're now discussing how best to engage and support you all. I do hope you'll take the chance to pop into our Discord and say hello and continue with feedback that can help us make the best decisions for our users.

Just wanted to add that some simpler option of buying the license would be sweet, it tends to be much easier to get signed up for something that doesn't require contract and we can just use company credit card. Maybe it could be available while offering something akin to previous Free Enterprise (without new, cutting edge features) license but with higher seat limits? I don't know, just spitballing.

I like paying for things that I use and bring me value, but at the moment Sourcegraph is a hard sell due to high cost compared to small company size and being based outside of Western Europe and US.

Hey there, I'm an individual dev who uses it only for personal projects. I use the docker container for on-premise, private usage only in a VM with no internet connection that I run at home. I use it to index all my personal projects and open source repos... 100 or so repos.

I really wish the enterprise stuff was available to the single user case like mine. Everything past v4.3.1 is hot garbage, as you guys really nerfed it for non-enterprise users ever since you removed "showEnterpriseHomePanels" among a few other things. I regrettably can't upgrade to anything newer because of that.

I would LOVE to have the ability to pay you guys say, $100 a year or something reasonable for just a private onsite enterprise license for one person -- myself. I continue to advocate for your products in all the enterprise contracts I work as that's what I'm most familiar with and tinker with when I work on my own personal stuff on my own free time.

I think it would be great to just have all those features for one user, and for a reasonable yearly fee for a single developer to be able to afford.

If you guys are concerned about being ripped off -- For example, some company buying this "single user enterprise license", I don't think they would if you limit it to one admin user. No company is going to risk sharing creds for a superuser account / keys to the kingdom, and if they do, they are some fly-by-night company with no sense of security that was never going to give you guys money anyway.

That's my two cents.

tl;dr: I can care less if it's open source or not. I just care that enterprise is affordable to the home user and that I can still run it on premise and in a semi-airgapped network environment.

When you say Sourcegraph has a zero telemetry policy for the open source version, can you tell me where in the pipeline the events are dropped?

From my prior code inspection, I recall seeing OSS code making regular “pings” back to Sourcegraph even when telemetry options are disabled by users. Survey toasts also appear to send information to HubSpot when answered.

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