Prateek Dayal

One of the tools that I use everyday to stay productive while working out of home is assembla. Its a svn+trac hosting provider and they had a very generous free plan till about a day or two back. However recently they decided to shut down the free plan and have only paid plans. They have certainly kept the pricing for their paid plans very low but its nevertheless much more than zero that people expect on the internet.

The result is what you would expect on the internet. There are abuses flying all over the place, as you can see in the comments to the blog post. Some people are upset about assembla not communicating all this properly but for most part, people don’t want to pay. However Andy from Assembla has some very valid points to make in comments (and another blog post)

• They have 50k developers using assembla out of which about 5k are paid
• The free subscriptions are increasing at 8x per year
• They currently spend $5K a month to support free plans. However next year the same would cost 40K a month
• Assembla is not venture capital backed company
• Advertising won’t work for them as page views are very small (as expected since most people access assembla using desktop clients)
• Most people on the free plan never upgrade and a lot of these people are VC funded firms having millions of dollars

I agree that there is no way assembla can keep offering the free plan and still make profits. I think free is for most part unsustainable on the internet. You can offer it for sometime out of your savings or for a little longer if you are funded but it can’t stay forever. I however think that assembla should have let existing users stay on the current plans and stop the free plans for new signups. However its their product and their choice.

On a final note, I want to point out that in the comments to the blog posts, no one has complained about their service and most people have in fact mentioned how they love it. However they still have trouble making those people pay a little sum of money. Its this expectation that makes it very hard for smaller companies/startups to innovate. A great product does not mean people will buy it. They would however use it for free. Such is the internet!

What am I doing? I have some archived projects which I would take offline and continue using assembla for Muziboo. I think its just $2.3 a month currently which is nothing compared to what they offer.

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assembla, business model, free