
Hacker Monthly Presents: Hacker Bundle - rmldsky
http://hackerbundle.com/
======
lobotryas
I would buy this but - like the hours on an AOL Free Trial CD - I would never
have the time to extract value from each of the offered services.

These services have confusing end times (3 month, 6 month, 12 month,
transactional?) At a bare minimum I'd have to keep a calendar of what expires
when and that's just an extra hassle. Next time, please work out a deal where
ALL offered products end on the same date so there's less complexity buyers
have to keep in mind.

Another concern: this bundle seems to have a mish-mash of offerings with
little rhyme or reason. It's like someone said "let's throw as many vaguely
web development related SaaS products together and hope there'll be something
for everyone!".

Finally, why SaaS? Sure, it's a great business model for a company, but as a
consumer each time I sign up for a SaaS I have to make a calculated risk:

* Does the service have a good data export option?

* How likely this service will be around for a year or longer if I'm to sink my time learning it?

* Does this company have any exposure and does it look like it knows what it's doing?

If you decide to stick with SaaS, I hope you curate better and streamline the
deal, but frankly I'm looking forward to a Bundle of installed apps instead.

~~~
bearwithclaws
The deal is curated. All the mentioned apps were either from my personal
experience using it or recommendation from HN.

Great guidelines on choosing SaaS (noted for future deal curation). And you
are right about the end times. I'll keep an eye on that for the next bundle.

Thanks for the feedback! It's my first time doing this, and rest assured I'm
listening with all ears.

~~~
tsumnia
Like lobo had mentioned, I would like to see a program-based bundle. If you
were to able to follow the HumbleBundle's pricing scheme for programs like
Sublime Text (and even f.lux which is free), coupled with other utility
packages, I would be inclined to pitch in some cash.

~~~
AJ007
From a marketing standpoint, a smaller group of closely related / themed items
may be a better attention receiver than 15 misc items.

The downside is the incentives for the sellers may not be as clear being they
may end up as just a bunch of competitors doing the same thing.

------
wmat
I'm so uncool! I have no idea what any of the included services are. From what
I can gather, it's SaaS stuff. If it had included a free monthly neck beard
shave, I might have purchased. I'm sure this package is useful to some of you
out there, but honestly, I don't know one person that I consider a "hacker"
that this would appeal to. Nice marketing use of the term "hacker" though.

Excuse me, I have to get back to yelling at the teenagers to get off my lawn.

~~~
fishtoaster
I would imagine the "Hacker" bit is because this is affiliated with
"HackerMonthly", a monthly print compilation of Hacker News. The actual
services seem mostly aimed at early stage startup projects.

~~~
dlhavema
it says it's a "Print magazine of Hacker News", but then what does this mean
"Digital subscription for 12 months*" Do they mail you an actual magazine, or
do they email you a PDF/e-book of the articles?

~~~
bearwithclaws
It's PDF/ebook :)

------
robbiet480
FYI all of the things in the bundle are for new users only. I just tried to
use the Twilio credit but they said trial accounts only. Refresh the page and
notice that under every company it now says new users only. I was just hoping
for a steep discount on many of the services I use. Teaches me to read the
fine print I guess.

------
Rickasaurus
I would love to see this same thing but for box software tools, like sublime
text and such. It worries me becoming dependent on external services like
this.

~~~
bearwithclaws
Noted. Any particular apps you'd like to see? (please send an email to me
cheng.soon@hackermonthly.com)

~~~
sanbor
Maybe you can make a setup of FOSS tools that hackers uses (OpenSSH, vim,
tmux, Ubuntu, etc.) and make a big donation to them as a way to say "thank
you".

~~~
skimmas
+1 for that. I would rather donate to debian than ubuntu though

~~~
codygman
Indeed, ubuntu seems to be going a bad direction IMO. The other issue is that
I frequently have issues with Ubuntu. I try to submit bug reports, but the bug
report submitter crashes.

I would do it manually, but hey... I'm busy... and I'm just trying ubuntu out
to give it another chance. Of course going back to debian+xfce I _never_ have
any problems.

/endrant

------
pestaa
Earned my upvote because this is indeed a nice deal and probably tons of
effort went into creating this kind of relationship with that many companies.

However, am I the only one who enjoys setting up Graphite and CI and similar
software? (No email, though. Did it once, and don't want to give up sleeping
time for a week to do it again.)

~~~
pbiggar
[disclaimer: I work at CircleCI, which is in the Bundle].

Good question! I think a lot of devs get therapeutic enjoyment from setting up
CI. It starts out as fun for the first few hours, while everything is new and
exciting. However, it turns to disdain very quickly when:

\- you need to remember how to set up postgres/rvm/lucene again

\- you need to add a 2nd server and realize you now need to manage a cluster
(and you didn't automate the first one!)

\- you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because the
company CI server is down

\- you realize the tests run too slowly and now need to figure out how to make
them faster

\- you get a bad performance review because of all the valuable engineer time
you're wasting managing the CI server, which you could have outsourced for a
fraction of the price

\- you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on
to make great products.

These are the sort of problems that hosted CI like
[https://circleci.com](https://circleci.com) solve for you :)

~~~
philsnow
> you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because
> company the CI server is down

This is a general problem with any kind of maintenance or setup that you might
do. Did you write a diary of how you went about setting it up ? Did you
communicate to the rest of your team how it's supposed to work / how you
suspect it might break ?

If not, don't be _too_ surprised to be The One Person who gets called about
that thing.

~~~
pbiggar
This is one of the reason we favour hosted services as much as possible. If
the rest of the team has account on the service, you can likely solve your
problems without relying on a single person.

------
yaddayadda
The only one that looks useful to me is the Geckoboard @ 50% lifetime off. But
I'm confused, it also says, "50% lifetime discount off any plans* (usually
$294)". Which of their plans is usually $294
([http://www.geckoboard.com/plans-and-
pricing/](http://www.geckoboard.com/plans-and-pricing/))? And is it lifetime
for the initially selected plan, or can I maintain the 50% off when I upgrade?

~~~
bearwithclaws
I kinda forgot how I came up with the figure $294. I remembered (vaguely) it
was taking one of the plan with the assumption that customer would stay for 3
years or so.

I think the 50% discount applies even when you upgrade. Let me shoot an email
to Geckoboard to confirm this.

------
chinmoy
This is awesome and inspirational. My sincere respect to Lim Cheng Soon. Doing
this with 12 companies must have been tough. VERY tough considering he lives
in Malaysia. Lesson for those outside of the US and complaining about it. It
really doesn't matter where you live as long as you are hustling. Lim Cheng
Soon, take my bow!

~~~
bearwithclaws
Thanks!

Actually it's not tough. You could get a lot done using email ALONE. And,
living in Malaysia gives me unlimited runway to keep shipping and
experimenting. :)

------
Splendor
I'm not sure the Humble Bundle model works well for SaaS.

------
atrniv
Looks like a nice place to test out what happens when you type 'sudo rm -rf /
\--no-preserve-root' on an ec2 instance :)

~~~
xauronx
What does this mean?

~~~
jebeng
Recursively deleting everything.

~~~
jtheory
Sure, but what does that have to do with the Hacker Bundle?

------
jlgaddis
> A portion of proceeds goes to Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I'm interested in knowing what the "size" of the portion is.

------
apashee
This is pretty awesome. For someone that's starting out it offers basic things
like version control hosting for cheaper than it already is. Also the fact
that it comes with Growth Hacker is pretty cool too, along with a 90 day money
back, you honestly can't go wrong here. Big thanks to HM for this.

------
poxrud
This is great. I was planning to purchase a few of those services at full
price anyways.

------
jtsnow
Most of the bundled offers provide savings for a limited time. After
purchasing, does one have control over when each of the services start or do
they all start immediately?

~~~
bearwithclaws
You'll get a redemption key page after purchasing. You can then redeem the
services (selectively).

~~~
alexenko
Do the redemption keys expire?

~~~
bearwithclaws
Some of them do. I'll add in the expiry date to the redemption key page
today/tomorrow.

------
pdknsk
It's a great idea. What's missing though, is additional payment options. That
is a major reason why HIB is so successful.

~~~
bearwithclaws
Will probably add PayPal and Bitcoins in the next few days. Couldn't use
Amazon Payments or Google Wallet though (outside US).

------
jaxomlotus
Is this credit card info input secure? The credit card form comes up, but i'm
not seeing any https listed in the browser url.

~~~
bearwithclaws
The overlay is in a secure iframe (much like a Facebook “Like”). All
transaction information never touches hackerbundle.com.

p.s: You can use [https://hackerbundle.com](https://hackerbundle.com) if it
still concerns you. I just set it up last night.

~~~
tyilo
It isn't secure, even if it is in an iframe, as the href of the iframe could
easily be changed with a man in the middle attack. You should force https for
the whole site.

~~~
jtheory
Exactly right -- please do redirect to https at a minimum for any payment
pages.

The actual risk of a MitM attack is low, but it's certainly feasible; your
page would look exactly the same if it were tweaked en-route to use a
completely different source for the overlay iframe, and tweaking your page en-
route is possible because you're sending it unencrypted.

There's also a _web-standards_ rationale -- all payment pages should be over
SSL, because it's one of the few security precautions that non-technical users
can reliably verify. Any unencrypted-but-legit payment pages undermine the
lesson that payment pages should be SSL-only, when we should be encouraging
it.

~~~
taproot
Why would you do _that_ at minimum.

At minimum, redirect the entire site to https. Why bother with anything less?
Https is easy.

[http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/ssl/ssl_howto.html](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/ssl/ssl_howto.html)

~~~
jtheory
There are valid reasons why a site might find switching to full SSL harder
than just fixing payment pages. Use your imagination.

What if they rely on free CloudFlare support for site content? Going full SSL
will mean another $20/month of hosting cost.

What if the site in question comprises a thousand HTML pages written on MS
Frontpage over 15 years, and most of those pages (if flipped to https) will
start showing "insecure content" warnings until they're edited?

By all means, doing more than the minimum will be trivial for some sites, and
a good idea for them, but that's not true for everyone.

~~~
taproot
And this site in question? Yea, thats what I thought. There are exceptions to
every rule but this is certainly not one of them.

And really, those aren't exceptions I would call worthy.

CDN / cheap ass issues: you're selling something and running a business,
businesses have costs, 20/month aint nothin to secure you're shit.

15 years worth of legacy frontpage you call content: the "insecure content"
warnings are probably right regardless of ssl. Further to the point, nobody
cares about 15 years worth of shit nobody reads, move it to a different
subdomain if its static junk that can't be secured, or I don't know delete it?
We'd all be better off without it clogging up the interwebs anyway.

SSL Isn't new, its been around almost two decades, you're making bad excuses
for bad people. Stop it. Site wide HTTPS is a good idea for everyone and it is
trivial, if its not (in your case), that is your fault and your problem - not
mine, and certainly not your users.

~~~
jtheory
I had moved on to talking about sites in general; the site in question would
be just fine with site-wide SSL.

For the rest of it -- at some point you're going to have to get used to the
idea that the people putting content on the web are a lot more diverse than
you'd prefer, and their motivations are also a lot more diverse than you might
imagine or think "worthy".

If you want to tell them all "do it right or go die in a fire" that's your
prerogative, but it's not the most effective approach.

------
robbiet480
No matter what browser I am in, I can't purchase this. It just says it can't
verify my card information. Chrome and Safari on Mac. I checked the card 3
times and just used it a few minutes ago.

Edit: Lim instantly reached out to rectify the issue. Turns out my bank
(Chase) flagged it for fraud. Cleared it with them and now I own the hacker
bundle :)

~~~
bearwithclaws
Just dropped you an email.

------
olegp
This is great! Are you thinking of making the list of offers available via RSS
or an API? We would love to link to them from our web app directory at
[https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com)

------
driverdan
Nice. This is what AppSumo used to be. They used to offer package deals on
SaaS products. Unfortunately they haven't done so in a long time. Glad to see
someone else is stepping up.

------
jere
Just noticed the order is random. Is that some kind of A/B test?

~~~
bearwithclaws
Not A/B test. I just use jQuery to shuffle the order. Inspired by Stripe's
team page I guess: [https://stripe.com/about](https://stripe.com/about)

~~~
jere
I only get about half the offers above the fold and some obviously look more
interesting than others. I'm wondering if it _would_ be valuable to know which
offers are correlated with higher purchase rates?

------
zachgersh
Slight nitpick, if you have limited quantities of something list the total
remaining instead of just saying "limited quantities".

------
resu
Seems like a pretty good deal! Do the memberships automatically renew?

~~~
bearwithclaws
It depends. But good point, I'll add this to the redemption key page on which
providers automatically renew and which did not.

Thanks!

