
GitKraken Pricing Clarification - petepete
https://blog.axosoft.com/2016/10/07/gitkraken-pricing-clarification/
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rout39574
I feel particularly burned by the GitKraken price inversion, because I'd
advocated it as a good free tool to help the windows-bound see git in an idiom
they found natural. As a free tool it seemed a brilliant marketing ploy, a
loss leader to their family of products, an opportunity to convince a
potential customer of their design chops. It even made it worth loading their
web page. (full-screen background animations? Really?)

I feel baited, switched, and played. Oh, well.

~~~
gizmo
It's free for personal use and very inexpensive for commercial use. Comments
like yours baffle me. I don't understand how either hobbyists or professionals
are hurt by the current pricing. There is no lock-in or anything like that,
you still have the option to go back to the command line interface. No harm
done.

~~~
rout39574
So, I work in a University environment, where software purchase of all sorts
is tightly budget constrained. The difference between "free" and "gotta ask my
Director for a budget line" is huge, especially for what is essentially a
promotional acquisition.

I was advocating it as a free window for the VC-unwashed into this strange and
fabulous thing called 'Git'. When it became no-longer-free, I felt that my
advocacy had been transmuted into shilling. My claim was turned into an
untruth.

I'm content to be judged oversensitive, and I wouldn't have brought it up, but
I was happy to whine when the story came by. :)

------
cyberferret
I downloaded and signed up for Git Kraken about a year ago. Good tool, that I
use from time to time alongside the command line for Git. I especially like
their branch visualisation.

I am a little concerned though, because I thought that I had a 'free for life'
licence as per their original promotional campaign. Does this now mean that
future upgrades will remove functionality or lock down the software if I don't
upgrade to the Pro version? I am a one man software house (so I fit the first
requirement for an 'always free version') but I have been in business for over
2 decades now, which negates the second part.

If this is the case, then I have other choice but to move back to SourceTree
for a free GUI client for Git. I am not that tied to Git Kraken that it
precludes me from moving back to pure command line or SourceTree. There is
also no 'lock in' for software that is basically a wrapper around a command
line system that doesn't really add anything extra to the functionality.

~~~
petepete
My understanding is that the terms and conditions you agreed to initially
still stand, but if you upgrade you'll have to agree to a new set.

~~~
rout39574
Automatic updates are essentially routine now, to get "important security
updates" if for no other reason. In that setting, I think your line of
reasoning is nearly irrelevant. "Never upgrade again, and never be able to
install on another machine" doesn't have much functional similarity to
"Lifetime license for the software"

------
brudgers
I can't get upset about the company figuring out a viable pricing model and to
me the effect of the change in terms on users is a byproduct of taking a
dependency on Gitkraken versus the tradeoffs for a dependency on an
alternative.

From a business standpoint, I think the pricing model should probably just be
to charge everyone. It avoids the moral hazard of monetizing the free binary
blob using the Oracle JVM on Windows model, eliminates non-paying users, and
the distraction of pursuing the free-sample dope peddler's model as a part of
the pipeline.

For a product like Gitkraken, the dope peddler model seems unlikely to
generate a lot of good viable leads in the funnel. To convert a non-commercial
user to a commercial user, the user has to switch to a commercial context and
be in a position to strongly influence use _and_ purchase decisions _and_ be a
bit evangelical about Gitkraken. To me, a commercial/non-commercial licensing
model is a bit at odds with creating that level of good will.

In other words, dual licensing closed source code along commercial/non-
commercial lines seems to work against the psychological zeitgeist in the
programming world.

