The company blog of Assembla, a hosted Subversion and Git code hosting and project management service, with posts on agile and teams.
HN links it for changes to Assembla's free plans, which commenters criticize as flaky, and for its posts on agile and deployment speed.
I think the rationale behind this is important for all SAAS (and software) businesses to learn from:
a) Desirable customers really don't care about the difference between $4 and $9.
b) The user experience of consistent and predictable pricing is much more important than getting prices which are "rationally connected with costs" or "as cheap as possible". (Businesses in particular hate microtransactions. OKing a $20 a month transaction is trivial, OKing an ongoing variable cost is not -- I need to attach detailed projections and get the projections vetted by three people.)
c) If you prominently advertise Only Costs $2! and Use Us Because $10 Is Too Much To Pay For This Service! then your customer base is going to be primarily people who are looking to spend no more than $2 and you will have to write blog posts when you plan on doing major, disruptive changes like charging more for a business input than their morning latte costs.
Edit:
Prior blog post on pricing here:
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7870/SaaS-is-cheap-results-from-the-Assembla-subscription-campaign.aspx
Factoids: Most popular plan costs $2.30. Average ticket size below $10. Company very, very proud that their average customer spends less than the cheapest plan at competitors. (This was, apparently, not a red flag at the time.)
Assembla isn't free for closed-source projects (http://www.assembla.com/plans?locale=en) unless there's a hidden plan. Apparently they made the change back in 2008 (http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/6986/Release-2-0-restricting-free-plans-giving-back-with-features-and-pric), but this article was written today which is confusing. Am I missing something?
BitBucket (http://bitbucket.org) went free for private repositories a while back and recently added git support. That might be a better alternative today.
I "complained" on their blog and got a fair response from their team. Here's what they said: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/12217/April-14-Repo-Blitz-Free-unlimited-SVN-and-GIT-and-much-more.aspx#comment39418
To summarize: they didn't have a sustainable business plan and when the costs got too bit they canceled free service. They say now that they're better prepared.
Maybe they're worth giving another try?
Agreed.
It looks like the author was getting some heat for that point.
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/87899/Seven-Things-I-Hate-About-Agile.aspx#comment179715
If you take him for his word, I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it (he says he's in that demographic). But I can't say that I'd let him off the hook that easily. Off-hand comments like this almost always come back and bite hard.
I could have sworn their accounts used to be free and then they took away the free accounts in 2008. http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7019/New-subscription-plans-Clarification-and-even-better-pricing.aspx
I remember because we were using assembla for some stuff and then moved away when they started charging. I guess that move didn't work too well for them.
Was.
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/6986/Release-2-0-restricting-free-plans-giving-back-with-features-and-price-reductions.aspx
Okay, it still is great in terms of features, and maybe for open source/public projects. But their flakiness in the past week and their management's communication issues put them to the "was" category for us.