
Why the World Needs Another Git Repository Hosting Service - ayushsood
https://legitteams.com/blog
======
encoderer
1\. As others have said: BitBucket.com. Every time these guys are on here
promoting this service they act like they've never heard of it. But they're in
this space? Doesn't make sense.

2\. I don't know how good I feel trusting my source code to a sorta-startup
run by a small group of fulltime students. I don't think you should quit
school to run this startup, but I do think this is an awfully serious service
to try to offer in your spare time.

Yes, it's a developers job to ensure that he has backups -- and Git repos lend
themselves to this very well. But that doesn't absolve you of the
responsibility to treat your user's code as if they have no other copies and
no other backups.

3\. Your post about why the world needs another Git hosting service just
explains why you think Github isn't the right fit. It doesn't really make your
case.

4\. When you're talking to engineers and you write this big setup paragraph
about how much work it was just to share a git repo, and all of us are
familiar with the myriad of hosting options, it just makes you look like you
either don't know about your competition or you're hoping _we_ don't. Not an
effective strategy.

5\. Github will give free repo's to students. And if you're not a student and
you want a private repo paying a small amount for it is not a bad thing. In
fact, it's a good thing. My code is valuable to me. I want to pay you a fair
sum for a fair service.

I don't think you should quit what you're doing if you're having fun,
learning, and believe in your idea. But GitHub is a huge brand with a ton of
goodwill from the community. BitBucket is own by Atlassian which generally
makes great things. Both have fantastic GUI's for Windows & Mac and great
websites. So far I haven't heard anything that differentiates you. Don't treat
me like I'm dumb, just show me why you're better.

~~~
ayushsood
1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the
number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work.
As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our
own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.

2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students
can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to
apply such a generalization to all students.

3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private
repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of
services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in
one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across
succinctly.

4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting
up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party
hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why
we created Legit Teams—they were the context.

5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and
educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private
repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on
repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when
developing with others.

~~~
encoderer
It's not that I feel (or said) that "college students can't be trusted." But I
don't want to have to worry about changing my project hosting if you guys
decide to call it quits. I add webhooks, hard-code remote URLs into automation
scripts, etc. I think you have a barrier of seriousness and longevity to
overcome before I'd "invest" my time on your platform. And yes, I think it's a
little higher because you're still students.

You could probably overcome that by going the balsamiq route and showing a
consistently growing, profitable business. It's not an accident that it's
normal to announce funding rounds in a press release: being able to associate
yourselves with either massive profits or trusted brand name investors gives
you credibility that being a couple guys with a good looking landing page
doesn't.

I hope you take this all in a constructive way and know that I, and most other
people in our industry, applaud you for shipping.

------
dchuk
Um: <https://bitbucket.org>

Not necessarily a reason to avoid the niche, but the reasons you listed to
enter aren't very good (namely, too expensive for lots of small projects) as
BitBucket solves that problem.

Never ever ever ever compete on price.

------
debacle
Your price points are all wrong. No one cares about the difference between $3
and $6. In 2012 dollars, we're talking penny candy.

A single price point would be less confusing, but I don't really understand
the appeal. Anyone who doesn't trust github and/or needs that level of secrecy
will be willing to shell out the $10 a month for a dedicated instance that
they can install git on themselves.

In short, I don't think you can be competitive with github because I think the
frictional market you're trying to target doesn't exist in the capacity that
you would like to think it does.

------
di
Github offers free educational accounts to students with *.edu addresses:

<https://github.com/edu>

------
bjxrn
This is a weird article that pretends that Github is the only git hosting
service that exists. Bitbucket would probably suit their stated needs.

~~~
w33ble
That's exactly what I thought. 2 paragraphs in I was expecting a Bitbucket
mention and a reason why it didn't work for them and found none. Search the
page and there's no mention of it at all. Then I wrote the article off as an
uninformed rant.

------
sonier
Many mentioned bitbucket.org, I use their service everyday and love it. They
have free unlimited repos for students:
[http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/04/01/free-unlimited-user-
sou...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/04/01/free-unlimited-user-source-code-
hosting-for-university-students/)

I host all my private work with them and have never had a problem.

------
timjahn
For the segment of people you're targeting, there is very little difference
between $3 and $6 a month, let alone $3, $4, $5, and $6 a month. We're talking
portions of a Starbucks coffee here.

I'd focus on why you're different than the (already loved and highly used)
existing options out there. Then I'd think about revamping the pricing to have
each plan be more differentiated.

------
glavata
<http://assembla.com> \- Free private repo (svn/git) with ability to add many
users.

------
zxypoo
Have they heard of Bitbucket? Gitoroius?

Gitblit? <http://gitblit.com/>

------
oz
_So why should we be paying approximately $1/repository when we don’t need all
the open-source-focused features? And why does it make sense to pay per
repository when the real cost is in space and IO? Our whole set of
repositories probably aren’t more than 500 MB. And 500 MB, at current prices,
costs merely a few cents. IO, in like manner, is negligible; we only push our
repositories to the server once in a while. So why $10 or $20 a month?_

If you EVER take one thing away from HN, 'tis this: NEVER compete on price. It
is a race to the bottom. There will _always_ be someone willing to provide the
service for less than you. Just don't do it.

------
jessedhillon
I would imagine that these guys are very sad and depressed right now, given
all the harsh -- and correct -- feedback that they've gotten here. I'll try to
add something different:

The various competitors in this space compete apparently on public/private
visibility, price, storage quotas, and user+repo counts. If you compete on
these dimensions you will have a very difficult time differentiating yourself
-- there simply is not enough difference between one repo provider and another
on these bases to matter. Cost of switching, I would imagine, is relatively
easy -- `git remote add`, `git push`, and done?

There is also, perhaps, competition on UI/UX quality. This can be a
differentiating factor for some, but I think not as strong as it is for other
markets, given the strong technical background of the target market. If you
had some original and compelling offer which had a poorer but workable UI
(which improved rapidly over time), that could negate the advantage that e.g.
Github has over you on interface.

I don't have any better ideas for this space -- the generic advice for you I
would give is to innovate in some different, not-already-explored way. Can you
provide something completely different from more users, more repos, more
storage, lower price?

~~~
ayushsood
We are not sad; we realize this service is not meant for everyone and we
understand that we'll receive criticism. In doing so, we hope to better Legit
Teams.

We don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars
so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. It solves
an issue we were experiencing and, at the least, we'll use our own service
proudly.

Your points about competing on other dimensions do make sense, but as you seem
to imply yourself, it is hard to find exactly what those other dimensions are.
We're searching for this ourselves, but based on feedback we've received from
our friends, this is at least a preliminary service that they'd like to use.
We plan to iterate from here.

------
akurilin
If your team is small enough then BitBucket is a great option for closed-
source projects. The only difference is the lack of GitHub's interface and
neat features like graphs. I wasn't too impressed with the code-review
features for pull requests, but I don't remember GitHub being significantly
better either.

------
kidh0
Come on, there are many options in the market that suits well in every
mentioned need, just to point, <http://www.codeplane.com> just right the same
thing.

Ok, you can create a new service, but you shouldn't act like you're the only
one around that do what you do.

------
tylerhowarth
When I was in College (just graduated a few months ago), GitHub applied a $7
coupon to my account, which covers a micro account. All I did was ask about
student pricing. They should probably offer an educational discount with .edu
email verification.

------
kcbanner
1\. Rent server 2\. Host git repos

~~~
tlrobinson
3\. Maintain server

I'll gladly pay a reasonable fee for hosted services so I don't have to worry
about such things.

~~~
sunkencity
4\. put repos in dropbox folder

(5. have repo world readable when security fails)

~~~
hack_edu
6\. Walk on eggshells as to not accidentally delete your repos chilling in
userspace (everyone's had this experience at some point with Dropbox files)

~~~
mmahemoff
Dropbox does have a limited form of version control fwiw. Select a file on the
website and there's a "Previous Versions" item highlighted.

Not that I'm recommending this approach. That side, I do have GitHub repos
that are also in my Dropbox, so I can collaborate with non-technical folk. It
works great and haven't had a single issue with it in about 6 months of usage.

------
juddlyon
Beanstalk and Deploy are both nice as well. I've used Beanstalk extensively
and love it.

\- <http://beanstalkapp.com/>

\- <http://www.deployhq.com/>

~~~
ericcholis
I've been using DeployHQ to manage simple deployments from git. So easy to
setup!

------
csense
If you want private repo hosting on the cheap, I would suggest using Gitolite
[1] on a VPS [2].

The current version includes self-service key management, regular users are
able to create repos in their own namespace, and easy forking of repositories.
It's extensible, you can write your own commands in any language.

Granted, it has minuses. It only has a command line interface (no GUI),
requires a little setup and editing of configuration files and reading of
docs.

[1] <https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite>

[2] <http://prgmr.com/>

------
jakebellacera
I want my code stored in a safe place that sees regular backups in case of
disk failure, or I'd throw it on my own VPS. Your service's website does not
provide any information addressing security.

------
azernik
If you really want to pay only for the I/O you're using, just spin up an EC2
instance and install GitLab (<http://gitlabhq.com/>).

~~~
runako
Wouldn't you then be paying for the EC2 instance's idle time in addition to
the I/O you're using?

------
zmjones
You know github gives free private repositories to students right?

------
dangrossman
I use <http://repositoryhosting.com/> for $6 per month.

* Unlimited repositories

* Unlimited users

* Web interface / Trac / WebDAV, SSL everywhere

* Responsive support

* Automatic scheduled backups to Amazon S3

------
roothacker
A totally different way to think about this post, is that the guy who has
posted this post is a bitbucket fan or a clever promoter, so he has listed
every point that makes BitBucket differ from Github and is the reason, why it
is loved by a lot of guys out there.

If I am correct in my guess, then I really think its a great marketing
strategy, and if not then BitBucket guys should really think of marketing in
this way.

------
zimbatm
And if you want to host it yourself, these look like promising competitors:
<http://gitlabhq.com/>

~~~
mlitwiniuk
Gitlab team is making great software - basicaly they've copied what's best in
Github and released it to the world allowing you to set up your own git
hosting service (accessible only by your team). In my opinion it's great piece
of software as long, as you don't want to share your code with anyone out
there (beside your teammates). Ergo - it's better imo for students, as long,
as they have machine that will be able to host it (VPS basically).

------
OnesAndZeros
Congrats I say! But, there is no difference between 3 and 6 dollars per month.
Simply just put it at 5 for 2000MB knowing that not everyone will use all
2000. Keep things simple. You also need to tell me a bit more about your data
recovery plans etc and possibly where its hosted, AWS might add some weight.

------
unnu
You should always ask yourself, why the code you are going to write should not
be open source? It's only true for paid projects and may startup prototypes.
Paid projects should be not problem because they are paid. That leaves the
startup ideas.

~~~
mdip
I'll take a stab at this since I signed up for bitbucket after reading the
comments:

I have a lot of code. A LOT. It's mostly random things around data to make
tracking things in my life easier (diet being the most recent one). And most
of the code is crap in two ways: (1) I'd never want to be associated with it
in a public sense and (2) It's so specialized to my life that it's unlikely
that anyone would use it or contribute to it. Sure, there might be a few
hundred people in the world that could find it useful, but those few hundred
are unlikely to happen upon my kludged-up solution, and if they are, I'd feel
badly when it doesn't work for them the way it works for me due to my personal
configuration being hard coded throughout.

------
coliveira
I think the more competition in this space, the better. No reason why I would
want github to be the only game in town.

------
brunomiranda
See <https://codeplane.com/> for a good inexpensive alternative.

------
mtgx
Hopefully one that isn't based in US and can avoid being targeted by frivolous
patent lawsuits.

------
fakeer
Please don't get me wrong but whether the line below line in pricing was meant
to be a cute funny one liner? 1MB, really?

 _Simple Free 1 MB_

------
Toshio
Last time I looked gitorious.org was also a nice option.

