
Show HN: I built a self-hosted Basecamp alternative. Try the demo - 23andwalnut
http://www.duetapp.com/hn
======
danenania
I can understand the appeal of selling on codecanyon for the existing
marketplace you get access to there, but I would consider an independent
checkout for the website. Your design and branding are well done and signal
high quality, while codecanyon has more of a script/component flea market
feel. I think taking someone out of the flow of your site to buy there is a
bit jarring and might cause people to reconsider, especially enterprise-y
customers.

I also have the sense that you could probably raise your price significantly.
Considering what businesses pay for a service like basecamp, they aren't going
to blink if you charge them, say, $250 instead of $45 if the software is good.
For a business of any size, $250 and $45 are essentially the same as a one-
time cost--negligible.

~~~
binaryorganic
I second everything said here. (I definitely did a double take when I saw the
CodeCanyon link).

I think the thing to note with regard to price points is that I might be
willing to pay $45 "just to try it out", but that definitely wouldn't happen
at $250. I'd have to first make a sound decision about the software (through
the demo, etc).

At any rate, nice work!

~~~
jonknee
> I'd have to first make a sound decision about the software (through the
> demo, etc).

Which should be easy... Just offer a hosted version.

~~~
porker
So long as you can then get your data back out of the hosted trial version and
into your purchased copy...

------
michaelbuddy
I'll probably get buried but, here's what I'm going to suggest. Don't deviate
from the price too much. I'll tell you why. You're competing with pancakeapp,
buggenie, bugify, redmine, bugkick, mantis, Zoho (on some level) and many
more, including some of the cheaper hosted basecamp clones. And I'm already
considering buying yours. Your pricing is great. And I appreciate what you're
doing.

I wouldn't go more than $69 or $79 if you raise your prices at all. If you
have future build plans you can always charge for the next version upgrade or
specific enhancements. If you want this to be the product you work on and
support, try to charge what you can to sustain yourself and grow, but you're
going to turn off a bunch of freelancers at some $295 price point that people
are suggesting on HN. Somebody said, "for businesses of any size the
difference between $250 and $45 is negligible." Um no, These same people
(thousands of comments worth) are royally pissed about the Adobe Cloud pricing
and are looking for alternatives.

I wouldn't even consider it at $295 price and many others wouldn't either.
Why? Because I can get a proven system for many months or permanently at that
rate. And for the FOSS ones, I might even become a contributor or leverage the
community for enhancements or plugins in those cases.

HN is full of people trying to charge more and a ton of them are going to fail
or become irrelevant. Basically your product is for freelancers, not
enterprise. That's a fact, luck of the draw, however you want to look at it.
Enterprise might trickle in after enough freelancers are rocking your system.
Enterprise use Mantis, and that's free. Why should they be turned off by a low
price. You might even find small businesses you didn't think of using you
product that will be more attracted to your price. There are other things you
can do, like try to get bundled with something else, or offer installation
service at a rate.

Sell it on your own if you can using Stripe or some other managed provider
that isn't taking so much of a cut. Or don't sell it exclusively on
codecanyon. you should be making the majority of the money, a lot more than
half.

~~~
maratd
Agreed.

I'm currently using <http://www.fusioninvoice.com/> which is a free open
source Bootstrap/PHP/MySQL invoicing system. Has clients, estimates, invoices,
etc.

Very pretty, but doesn't have project management. This does. So I bought it.
Pretty sure I wouldn't have if it was three hundred bucks.

And yes, I'm a solo freelancer, so you're spot on.

~~~
X4
I tried all of that. Including Fusioninvoice, Rocketinvoice, Pancakeapp,
redmine, mantis, Zoho, BambooInvoice, SugarCRM and OpenERP and many little
invoice tool, but none of them offers such great UX and UI. The workflow here
is rocksolid.

I didn't know of: buggenie, bugify, bugkick.

Fusioninvoice is nice, but buggy and targets ONE language only, that English.
(Why don't people think about i18n and l10n from the beginning, when designing
something that's going to be used internationally.)

------
rsobers
Beautiful product! Just be aware of the support nightmare that comes along
with people trying to install your software in many different environments. I
will never, ever create installable software ever again.

~~~
todd3834
I've been thinking about this and I like the idea of building the software to
run on Heroku (or similar). For those that want a self hosted plan you just
tell them where to host it and if they want installation outside of that you
charge them a decent hourly rate to make it worth it.

~~~
cacois
That only half solves the problem. A lot of shops that want self-hosted
literally want to host it themselves, to keep data in their datacenters. if
you built something deployable to EC2, you could make sure it works on a local
Eucalyptus/OpenStack deployment or something. Or you could try to build for
OpenShift and tell clients them have to have their own OpenShift cloud. But
there's no real easy solution.

~~~
lallysingh
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport/>

You can export the VM from EC2.

------
23andwalnut
I've wanted a nice looking project/client management system that I could host
on my server for quite some time. Unfortunately there are very few options
that fit this criteria so I created my own. I would love some feedback - good
or bad.

~~~
brianfryer
Gorgeous. Love the concept, love the price, love the Stripe integration <3

Since you're asking for feedback, I thought this one thing was a little odd:

* Click on a Project (<http://www.plumtheory.com/demos/duet/#projects/1>) * View the calendar tab (<http://www.plumtheory.com/demos/duet/#projects/1/calendar>) * Click on a different Project (<http://www.plumtheory.com/demos/duet/#projects/2>) * The calendar tab is no longer being displayed.

Is there a way to view an overall calendar -and/or- switch between projects
without leaving a calendar view?

~~~
23andwalnut
Yes, I struggled with how that should work. I ended up deciding that the
default 'project tab' should open whenever you navigate between projects,
regardless of what tab you were viewing before. I'm definitely open to
changing it if enough people think the current implementation is awkward.

There isn't an overall calendar. I thought about adding one. I wasn't sure how
valuable it would be though.

~~~
brianfryer
> _There isn't an overall calendar. I thought about adding one. I wasn't sure
> how valuable it would be though._

I totally understand. You've put together a great product where you can (and
should) build more features based on customer feedback (rather than trying to
build every feature imaginable and never launching).

Kudos!

------
pajju
A working Demo link in codecanyon: [http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-
management/full_scre...](http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-
management/full_screen_preview/4613916)

Here is the codecanyon page for the same project:
<http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-management/4613916>

Customer reviews and comments: [http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-
management/discussio...](http://codecanyon.net/item/duet-project-
management/discussion/4613916)

\+ Feedback:

1\. I did not find any word on -- updates, documentation, support or future
upgrades from the developer. These things are more important. Who will
maintain this project on long-term? And that's why SAAS based offering sells.

2\. Also _without a trial_ , I will never buy a solution, self-hosted or SAAS!
I need to use it often to know that its the best-fit for my workflows.

3\. And this being a company's project-management tool, should be tried and
tested well: stable, secure and should work perfectly out of the box! I don't
want to put time in maintaining another project. :)

4\. Lock-in? Is there an import or export option from-and-to Basecamp or
others?

~~~
23andwalnut
Hi. I just updated the pricing page to address most of the points in #1. It
would be impossible for me to offer a trial since this software needs to be
hosted on your own server.

There's no lock in. It's on your own server so you have full access to the
mysql database with all of the info.

~~~
xr09
Easy to solve, just host a sample site with test data.

~~~
23andwalnut
How would that be different from the demo?

------
cmalpeli
Nice work! At $49 you are seriously undervaluing this product. I'd think you
could easily charge $395 or more. If I'm looking for a self hosted option for
project management, I'm likely in an org w/ some security restrictions, etc -
AKA the Enterprise. $49 may even lead me even think it's "too small" to buy if
i'm the Enterprise purchaser...

~~~
23andwalnut
When I first decided to start building this product, I had just started my
freelance career. I seriously considered ActiveCollab which is in the price
range you're talking about, but I just didn't have the resources to buy it. I
want this to be accessible to as many people as possible, even those people
just staring their business. But I agree, I will definitely lose out on some
customers because they think it's too small. Perhaps as the product evolves
and includes more features, I will consider raising the price.

~~~
einai
Thank you for doing that! As a freelancer, I'm much more willing to try a
product out for $45 than anything above $100.

------
csomar
Fellow CodeCanyon seller. Take your app from CodeCanyon, and try to reach the
entreprise market.

Price your product in this way:

\- single user: $79 ($49 for updates)

\- agency/small business: $299 (+ $129) + $199 for optional install

That's a pretty simple pricing, and it'll make you 1,000 time more sane than
putting it on CodeCanyon and fighting with dads and moms trying to setup this
on their shared host with a thousand other app and site.

This month estimate earnings on CodeCanyon: 100 (sales) x $45 x 0.7 (best
case) = $3,150

Support overhead: 100 person.

You'll need 20 single user license sales, and less than 6 sales in the
enterprise edition. That's just 26 person to support. Don't forget that
enterprise people are more inclined to give you the $200 and get the thing
setup.

~~~
ynh
I am currently also selling my product (newsletter mailer) via codecanyon. My
main concern leaving codecanyon is how to drive potential customers to my
site. As you already said there is a huge support effort on codecanyon, due to
"inexperienced" customers.

------
_k
Feedback :

\- An overall calendar would be good. \- Software updates would be good,
including what you're about to update and what type of php version the updates
need. \- Is it possible to change the text in the html ? I'm thinking about
using another language because I live in Europe. \- Not sure I understand the
concept of using the timer. When I click on something else, the timer stops,
and when I go back, it starts again, and eventually I end up with a list of
numbers. Also, the timer stops at 99 minutes, is that right (didn't check it)
? The site's not loading right now. Is the customer able to see the timer ? If
so, give us the ability to remove it. \- Not sure you should stay on
Codecanyon for this if you plan on giving support. \- Make sure you offer good
support, even if it comes at a price. \- It's not really loading very well
right now but that's probably because of HN. I now see 2 screens underneath
each other. I will have to come back and give it another try. \- Make How To
videos.

------
matthuggins
Saw this on reddit a few days ago. You could make a lot more money with it by
making it a hosted solution and charging monthly/yearly.

~~~
debaserab2
Then you are competing directly with Basecamp with no obvious product
differentiation. It's going to be tough to get traction going this way.

The fact that it can be purchased and installed is the differentiating factor
and may target a market audience that's largely ignored.

While there is usually the potential for higher sales with a SaaS approach,
that doesn't mean it's always the correct fit when entering a market.

~~~
UVB-76
Why not price as the differentiating factor? Basecamp is expensive for what it
is.

You could undercut Basecamp by a sizeable margin and still turn a nice profit.

~~~
jiggy2011
I imagine the sort of people who's primary requirement for project management
software is that it costs less than $20 per month to host 10 projects are not
going to make the best customers with the highest retention in the long run.

~~~
UVB-76
Granted, but at $20/month you only need them for two and a bit months before
you're earning more than with the $45 one-off fee sales model.

~~~
neogodless
Income yes, but profit no. Hosting is not free. You can, of course, work
towards minimizing hosting costs, but time spent on that may cut into other
priorities.

Of course, as mentioned above, saving time not having to support customer
installations could (easily?) offset hosting costs.

------
enduser
This looks great. However, the layout is unusable on mobile. Rather than
allowing me to use the desktop layout on mobile, all of the page elements are
layered on top of each other in a very garbled way. Maybe set a min-width for
the page?

------
EvaK_de
There's already at least one "beautiful self-hosted Basecamp alternative" out
there: Collabtive

...and it's free (FOSS).

~~~
kyro
That is considerably less beautiful than OP's product, if beautiful at all.

------
holic
Looks great!

I noticed the website uses Foundation while the actual app uses Bootstrap. Any
reason? Having used both, do you prefer one or the other?

~~~
23andwalnut
Thank! I use both fairly often. I have a strong preference for Foundation, but
bootstrap has a lot more components, which is useful when I'm building web
apps. Foundation is great for websites.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That's a really good way of characterizing the Foundation vs Bootstrap split.

At this stage, it just seems weird to start a new web project and not use at
least some framework.

As to the difference in number of components - the Bootstrap ecosystem is
massive -checkout:

[http://www.bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-
twitter-...](http://www.bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-
bootstrap-resources)

I've been slowly collecting links for a similar Foundation list and it hasn't
been going so well.

------
eiji
Why is it that you can have a professional website, that tries to sell stuff,
and there is no company or address or anything anywhere accessible?

Duet mentions a name, and 23&W has a contact form also, but there is just
nothing.

------
thehodge
This is excellent and I love the single price rather than a monthly fee (it's
one of the reasons I bought amaon)

~~~
kilian
Does anyone know of more such 'hidden gems'? I really want a self-hosted
website uptime (http status code) checker but I can't find one.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Why? That's an hour's work or less to write.

------
blackdogie
Wow, It's not just a task tracker. I must say i was happy to see that it can
take care of the invoicing side of things too. This would be a great solution
for webdesigned or other contract workers.

Looking at the invoicing system, it's hard to figure our all the options. But
if it's good I may decide move from <http://freeagent.com/> to host my own.
Are there any more plans to extent the financing side of the app ? Or any
particular roadmaps for the product ?

~~~
23andwalnut
Yes, I have a ton of plans for the app. I would have loved to build them all,
but I probably would have never shipped if I tried. Right now I'm just
gathering feedback and then I will start adding the features that people want
most in a couple of weeks.

------
yannis
Looks very nice and will purchase a bit later on. If you interested in
charging a couple of thou and add some customization for us, please email me.

------
rapcal
Just a heads up, maybe you could rename twitter-hogan to something else. I'm
getting ´ReferenceError: Hogan is not defined´ and a blank page because
"twitter" is blocked on my corporate network.
(<http://f.cl.ly/items/2o2p3c2X173Z3u2t1F2j/bug.jpg>)

~~~
23andwalnut
Whoa. Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to look into that.

------
kcoleman731
Let me start this off by saying that I love Basecamp and use it everyday...but
I am very intrigued by Duet. The app looks really great and I am a fan of the
way the UI and navigation are set up.

What I think you are missing however are Discussions. I find discussions to be
the single most valuable feature that Basecamp has to offer. I also love that
for any todo or file, project members have the ability to comment on that
item, which is essentially a discussion in itself.

The ability to keep all of the conversations that are taking place with
various members of both my internal and external teams in one place is
incredibly helpful. It eliminates the need to track disperate conversations
across gchat, gmail, skype etc, and gives all team members transparency into
the various facets of the project.

I think adding these features would make your app much more robust and
compelling.

------
ChrisNorstrom
I'm so happy you're selling this. After years of dicking around with free open
source plugins and scripts I have started avoiding them. The authors abandon
them, they have no road map, no future, bad design, no time to read feedback.

But when I see a for-profit script I know that the creator has an incentive to
keep pushing updates and maintanance and design.

Also, you should sell your script yourself AS WELL as selling it on
CodeCanyon. That way you can funnel people towards your site and make more
money per sale PLUS get the benefits of being on CodeCanyon's community.

The internet is NOT Walmart, there's no exclusivity contract, you don't have
to sell your product or service in only one place.

------
senorprogrammer
This is beautifully designed, and I think you ought to raise the price. Lots
of comments about the potential support headaches are spot-on; price as many
of those out as you can.

Check out patio11's online talks for more rational.

~~~
einai
I agree. A tiered pricing plan would really benefit OP. Adding a forum to
offload some of the one on one support would be great as well.

------
ux-app
Amazing looking product. Well done for nailing the visuals. Aggressive pricing
is a good move also, seems like the right way to get some good traction. I
would caution against the 'free forever' approach you've taken. Maybe free
updates for all 1.x releases, or free updates for 12 months will make it
easier for you to sustain the business.

FYI: I had no issues accessing your page this morning, however a couple of
hours later and I'm getting this from Sophos AV:

    
    
      Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website.

------
fsckin
Constructive tone: When I try to print, it looks really bad.

~~~
23andwalnut
Admittedly, I did not even think about printing. I will probably need to
create a print stylesheet. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
yesimahuman
IMO, that's one of the things that "Just Doesn't Matter" at this point, if
ever.

~~~
scott_karana
I'd almost always agree with your sentiment, but since Duet allows you to
generate invoices... ;)

~~~
yesimahuman
Ah, I thought you were talking about the home page only. I agree invoices
should print nicely :)

------
Braveatom
Very impressive. Just my 2 cents:

It would be great if there was some sort of auto invoice (it seems you have to
enter the time details in manually)

The calendar seems to always require scrolling down, it would be great if it
fitted in the view

Also, mobile support if its not there, for iPad at least with a home icon

And agree with other posters here, a timer that work across page refreshes and
overall calendar showing all tasks / deadlines for all projects would be
awesome.

------
X4
WOW, simlply wow! I WILL buy it, when I get paid for my current project! I was
just building this myself, incl. a url shortener and analytics, but this UI
blows it away! Every other solution out there I tried is inferior. I tried
many other invoicing WebApps.

    
    
        * Sir, can I help you by contributing??
        * I can code/sysadmin/design
    

May I suggest adding your Bitcoin adress?

------
chrislomax
I do think this is a market long forgotten and I do love the application
itself. Congratulations on getting it to market!

The one thing I can really agree on here is the installation procedure
involved with users. I know someone brushed on it but it may be worth looking
into Linode StackScripts and Amazon EC2 Images?

It might not even be a problem or suit your needs but I think it might help in
some cases

------
scrapcode
When trying to access the demo in Firefox 20 it throws an error for LESS:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can
stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script:
[http://www.duetapp.com/demo/client/js/libs/less-1.3.0.min.js...](http://www.duetapp.com/demo/client/js/libs/less-1.3.0.min.js:9)

~~~
23andwalnut
It definitely has something to do with the current load on my server. I didn't
adequately plan for it at all. I should have at least compiled my less files
and minified/concatenated my js files.

------
kunai
I really like the source model that you've got here. All the benefits of open
source without the sales leeches. Smart idea.

------
molsongolden
When you click send invoice does it send a copy of the invoice to the email on
file and give them a link to pay online?

Apologies as I know you are being bombarded with questions but this looks
fantastic for my small office situation.

Edit: I just purchased anyways and will experiment later this week. Would you
want to host a forum where users can discuss issues?

~~~
23andwalnut
It sends an email letting them know they have an invoice, the amount of the
invoice, and gives them a link to the invoice in the portal. Once I add the
ability to generate pdfs, it may also include the pdf as an attachment.

------
UnoriginalGuy
Nice site. It does have some nasty rendering issues for me on Chrome:
<http://i.imgur.com/nZT9OgU.png> (red circles added by me).

PS - More about my setup to help you reproduce:

\- Desktop Chrome 26 \- 1920x1080 \- 125% DPI (Windows) \- Zoom Level: 0
(default) \- Chrome Font Size: "Large"

------
arc_of_descent
Clean looks. I immediately checked out the task timer feature which does not
work as expected. If you start the timer and then go to the dashboard (I
should expect to see all "active" tasks here) and back the timer is stopped.

I currently use TaskCoach to keep track of all my tasks and invoice my clients
on a hourly basis.

~~~
23andwalnut
Yes, you need to keep the task open for the timer to continue to run. You
would want it to keep running in the background? It seems like it would be
easy to forget about if it's implemented that way...

~~~
arc_of_descent
Yeah. That why I use TaskCoach (desktop app) so the timer icon is always shown
in my notification area. But you can use the dashboard for this.

A year back I had started building a web based time tracker using HTML5
background workers and stuff. But I lost motivation. :(

~~~
actionscripted
Why not just have a start/stop toggle and record time segments so you don't
have to worry about a "running" timer?

------
tempi35
Could you please tell more about the development process? What was used:
icons, jquery and so on. Great product!

~~~
23andwalnut
I rolled my own MVC implementations for the client and server. The backend is
in php. The client MVC implementation uses Backbone events and the backbone
router, but everything else is custom. jQuery of course, Twitter bootstrap,
IconJar, some free icons I found on 365psd, glyphicons.

~~~
tmzt
You built the PHP router too?

------
jbrooksuk
Server is down for me.

~~~
23andwalnut
Yeah, I have a support ticket open with my host. The demo is hosted on a vps
with liquidweb. I thought it would be enough. I was wrong. :/

~~~
TallboyOne
is it a storm VPS? Just resize it yourself...

------
rjv
What type of license does it come with?

~~~
23andwalnut
I'm selling through codecanyon, so it comes with their regular license:
<http://codecanyon.net/licenses/regular>

------
jamesbrennan
If the developer is reading, it looks like you've got some bugs with tasks.
Editing the task weight always returns an error stating 'Please enter a value
no larger than 99NaN'. Also the description in that modal is 'Please enter a
value between 1 and 99NaN'.

~~~
23andwalnut
Thanks for the heads up. I'll get it fixed asap.

------
ishansharma
I second all the CodeCanyon suggestions and you should move away from there.

I am definitely going to get this. Though I wanted to ask if it has some sort
of import feature. I am switching from BC and it has loads of data and
projects there.

------
peteacc
Well done, love the idea! Just to let you know on the
<http://www.duetapp.com/features> page it says 'helpw' instead of 'help' under
the messaging section.

------
emehrkay
The demo doesn't appear to work in Webkit nightly.

syntax error: unexpected token '/' in less.js

------
zapt02
XSS vulnerabilities all over the place. No validation performed at all?
Example; <http://www.duetapp.com/demo/#projects/3/tasks/30>

~~~
23andwalnut
Hmm. There is definitely a lots of validation on both the client and server.
The demo refreshes every 30 mins so I'm not able to see what you're referring
to. Can you shoot me an email with the issue you're referring to and I'll look
into it asap. Thanks.

~~~
zapt02
I added description to a task which looked like this:
<script>alert('lol!');</script>

And it happily runs the script when you view that task.

------
einai
Hi, this looks like a nice and affordable product for freelancers like me.
Great job! If I purchase this app now, will I get free updates (eg, bug fix)
for at least a certain period of time?

~~~
23andwalnut
You sure do. If you purchase the app you will get all updates for free.

~~~
zerr
Why not limit this?

Annually and/or within major version updates, except [security] bugfixes of
course.

------
einai
One more question from me since I can't seem to log into the demo now. Will I
be able to disable certain features (eg, payment through Paypal - I would
rather get a check)? Thanks.

~~~
23andwalnut
Yes, you don't have to enable any of the payment options. You can just set it
to 'none' during installation or manually in the config file.

------
bradleyland
I can't find the system requirements. It's difficult to buy software you'll
run yourself without understanding what dependencies I'll need to support in
order to host it.

~~~
23andwalnut
PHP 5.3 andy Mysql. I'll add a more prominent requirements section now since a
lot of people have trouble finding it.

------
tfeldmann
Very nice. Is it possible to recover deleted files / projects?

~~~
23andwalnut
Nope. That's a good idea, but not sure whether I'll add it. I will definitely
be adding archive functionality within the next week or two though. So you can
archive a file/project, which gets it out of your way until you want to see it
again.

~~~
tnorthcutt
How will you handle updates for people who have already purchased?

~~~
michaelbuddy
he said earlier, updates are free.

------
scrapcode
Did you use a PHP framework to build this? If so, which?

~~~
23andwalnut
I actually didn't use any frameworks (server or client). They always feel to
heavy for what I'm trying to accomplish, especially php frameworks. I rolled
my own MVC implementations for both the client & server. I've been thinking
about porting the entire thing to Laravel + Backbone, to see if I like it
better, but I haven't made any decisions yet. If I do, it will probably be a
month or two before I get started.

~~~
wise_young_man
It seems a bit ironic to use a front-end framework, but not a back-end
framework. You should look at <http://fuelphp.com>, another alternative to
Laravel and is a light weight PHP 5.3 framework.

------
cateye
I see a lot of similarities with this self-hosted newsletter mail application:
<http://sendy.co/>

------
pests
Typo on <http://www.duetapp.com/features> -

"Integrated messaging helpw you keep your entire..."

------
saddestcatever
Great design! Is it possible for both clients and admins to add tasks? I can't
seem to find the action to add tasks as a client...

~~~
23andwalnut
No, clients can't add tasks. It would be extremely simple to modify the app so
that they can. It wouldn't take more than 5 minutes to make that change. I can
help if you decide to purchase it...

~~~
saddestcatever
Fantastic! That would make this perfect for me. Once I read (in an above
update) that updates are included, I purchased the app in a heartbeat!!

I just shot you an e-mail via codecanyon.

Looks great! Looking forward to giving it a shot tonight.

------
jjkmk
I just bought a copy, looked really good from the demo. I'm going to install
it and share my experiences with you guys.

~~~
23andwalnut
Awesome. Shoot me an email if you run into any trouble and I'll be glad to
help you out.

------
tonyoconnell
Great work. It's very elegant and delightful to use. Is there any way to
duplicate/clone a project?

~~~
23andwalnut
Not yet. It's a highly requested feature though, so it will probably be among
the first that I add. Along with the ability to download pdf invoices.

------
cudawas
How long did it take to build? Who did you involve in the process? Massively
great product!

------
matthewj
That's a really nicely designed sales page! Congrats on putting it together.

~~~
23andwalnut
Thanks! I actually did the sales page in 2 days. Foundation is great for
putting together nice looking sites in a short amount of time.

------
michaelbuddy
Your project is probably ripe for a kickstarter. Go for that too!

------
berberous
The text in the product images is blurry on my retina macbook.

------
j45
This is great. I can't wait for more and more attention to go back to self-
hosting.

One reason why: if you knew the LTV of a customer on a SaaS app, would there
be any reason to not sell it to them for self-hosting for that amount?

~~~
ruswick
Yes. Charging LTV for a product upfront would be categorically untenable for
both sides.

~~~
j45
In a way some of the success folks are seeing with selling info products, or
other things, could be possible, especially with small to mid offerings.

Software like FogBugz is available in both flavors, self-hosted or hosted by
them.

------
spoiledtechie
What platforms can it be installed on?

~~~
23andwalnut
The only requirements are php 5.3 and mysql (pdo).

~~~
jamroom
Speaking from years of experience with a self hosted PHP application, I'd
recommend a "recommend hosters" section in your FAQ. Setup an affiliate
program with them - most of your users will be happy to send you the referral
to know that you recommend and have a good experience with them.

Ones to really watch out for are Godaddy shared hosting (note that updates to
.htaccess files can take many hours to actually show and performance is
frequently abysmal) and "Hostgator" (they do something funky on some of their
shared hosting servers that breaks custom user session support if you use
that). You'll soon find there is a huge difference between quality and cheap
shared hosting.

~~~
tmzt
Do you have more details or a forum link on that Hostgator thing?

------
joeld42
you get huge points from me for using "Tessier-Ashpool" as the example client
in your screenshots. :)

------
X4
You're missing a FAVICON :)

------
mikegreen
server overloaded? website crawling...

------
thoughtcriminal
I'm wondering if there are easy to follow, step-by-step instructions on
setting it up on my own PC. Can Joe Sixpack set this up without too much
grief?

I'd like to use this for my own projects, but I'm way out of practice doing
this stuff.

~~~
23andwalnut
It comes with an installation script that's pretty simple to use. You just
need your database credentials. I can also install it for you if necessary.

~~~
TylerE
Joe Sixpack may not know what "credentials" means in this context, or how to
create a database account.

~~~
michaelbuddy
"Joe Sixpack" isn't using this software. This is a self-hosted project
management tool. "Joe Sixpack' isn't in this equation. They call a pro. By
your logic, WordPress is challenging to install without Softaculous, and even
hard to understand by "Joe Sixpack" with Softaculous. Keep it in perspective
of who this is for.

