5 ms·

I like Github and use it every day but as a longtime advocate of Fog Creek's software I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln terri

by andymoe 15y ago

I like Github and use it every day but as a longtime advocate of Fog Creek's software I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln territory (not to mention competition from the Australians) with not much response from Fog Creek to compete on the lower end of the market. Github enterprise Pricing/features are about on par with the Fog Creek offering. Git vs. Mercurial but it's still DVCS and though I would consider Fogbugz/Kiln a bit more advanced as far feature implementation all the major types of features are in both products. http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/for-your-server.html http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/for-your-server.html What I would REALLY love to see is Fog Creek compete a bit more in Githubs space with their hosted service. I think there is room in the market for a Fogbugz/Kiln lite product and the competition would do everyone, especially the users, a lot of good. I think Joel even wrote an article on pricing and market segmentation [1] unfortunately they may have already figured out the sweet spot with their current price points putting the prices in the range of me being able to get the bank I used to work for to use their product but not the little bootstrapped company where I currently work. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

pnathan 15y ago
Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users. E.g., if you have a 200-user company, that's still a flat rate of 15K initial & 5K/year for Fog Creek's stuff (plus maintenance). But for github, that's 50K/year. Github is a high-quality product, no question about it. But the price is steep compared to Kiln/Fogbugz, IMO.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- benatkin 15y ago
  > Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users. I don't agree with how you're using the word scales. It actually scales fine, as a percent of their budget per employee. It's flat. With GitHub Enterprise it's approximately 250 * (n + n % 20) dollars per year. For companies they're targeting, $250/yr is less than a percent of their total budget per employee (including salary, benefits, workspace, etc). If it saves each employee fifteen minutes a week it's worth it.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Disagree. Fogbugz gives a greater and greater savings per employee as your employee count goes up. Here's a Perl script I wrote to visualize the idea. Feed the output into gnuplot and you'll see what I mean. use warnings; use strict; use 5.010; use POSIX qw(ceil floor); # Let's start at 100 employees and walk up by 25. for(my $count = 100; $count < 1000; $count+=25) { # Flat rate for fogbugz/kiln. my $fb = 15000 / $count; # ceil(number of users / 20) * blocks of 20-seats to buy. my $gh = (ceil($count / 20) * 5000) / $count; say "$count $fb $gh"; } This asymptotically trends towards about $20/employee for Fogbugz; GitHub hangs around $250 per. At no point in these calculations is GitHub cheaper per than FogBugz. Now, in the < 100 employee range where the different FogCreek pricings apply, I am not sure who wins, I'd guess it trades off back and forth depending on the # of employees. edit: awkward formatting. Also, if I've biffed my formulas, let me know and I'll update it! edit2: forgot to comparatively do analysis
    - benatkin 15y ago
      Nice graph, but why does it need to be so much cheaper per seat as the business gets larger? Many items in the budget don't get much cheaper per seat as the business grows. A company that buys 1000 MacBook Pros doesn't pay half as much per MacBook Pro as a company that buys 10.
      - pnathan 15y ago
        Well, if you want to not be fiscally efficient...
X-Istence 15y ago
At the company I am at we use Gitorious, the initial setup took some time, but after that it has been smooth running.
dotBen 15y ago
I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln territory Competition is healthy for everyone and no company would expect to own an entire vertical (I'm sure Fog Creek doesn't). In this instance, this is actually a good thing for companies already using Kiln because there are high switching costs and so you wouldn't want to be on a platform that isn't being innovated and developed. A bit of healthy competition will ensure innovation continues and also prices stay competitive.
- andymoe 15y ago
  I agree that competition is healthy and what I'm saying is I'd like to see a volley back from Fog Creek into the lower end of the market that Github seems to control.
benatkin 15y ago
GitHub's not sad, and it's good they aren't. If you want to help your customers and your own business, it's best not to be too cozy with potential partners that may wind up being competitors. They've already been through this with LightHouse, and GitHub and their customers are better for it.
foobarbazetc 15y ago
"the Australians"? Who calls Atlassian that unless they work for FogCreek? WTF?
- andymoe 15y ago
  I did not want to bring them into the mix and it was the nicest thing I could think to say about them. Bitbucket and SourceTree (acquired) are quite usuable however I find JIRA and Confluence to be really kludgy ugly products but the same could be said for some of the stuff I produce so whatever.

by andymoe 15y ago

pnathan 15y ago

Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users. E.g., if you have a 200-user company, that's still a flat rate of 15K initial & 5K/year for Fog Creek's stuff (plus maintenance). But for github, that's 50K/year. Github is a high-quality product, no question about it. But the price is steep compared to Kiln/Fogbugz, IMO.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
benatkin 15y ago
> Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users. I don't agree with how you're using the word scales. It actually scales fine, as a percent of their budget per employee. It's flat. With GitHub Enterprise it's approximately 250 * (n + n % 20) dollars per year. For companies they're targeting, $250/yr is less than a percent of their total budget per employee (including salary, benefits, workspace, etc). If it saves each employee fifteen minutes a week it's worth it.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Disagree. Fogbugz gives a greater and greater savings per employee as your employee count goes up. Here's a Perl script I wrote to visualize the idea. Feed the output into gnuplot and you'll see what I mean. use warnings; use strict; use 5.010; use POSIX qw(ceil floor); # Let's start at 100 employees and walk up by 25. for(my $count = 100; $count < 1000; $count+=25) { # Flat rate for fogbugz/kiln. my $fb = 15000 / $count; # ceil(number of users / 20) * blocks of 20-seats to buy. my $gh = (ceil($count / 20) * 5000) / $count; say "$count $fb $gh"; } This asymptotically trends towards about $20/employee for Fogbugz; GitHub hangs around $250 per. At no point in these calculations is GitHub cheaper per than FogBugz. Now, in the < 100 employee range where the different FogCreek pricings apply, I am not sure who wins, I'd guess it trades off back and forth depending on the # of employees. edit: awkward formatting. Also, if I've biffed my formulas, let me know and I'll update it! edit2: forgot to comparatively do analysis
  - benatkin 15y ago
    Nice graph, but why does it need to be so much cheaper per seat as the business gets larger? Many items in the budget don't get much cheaper per seat as the business grows. A company that buys 1000 MacBook Pros doesn't pay half as much per MacBook Pro as a company that buys 10.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      Well, if you want to not be fiscally efficient...

X-Istence 15y ago

At the company I am at we use Gitorious, the initial setup took some time, but after that it has been smooth running.

dotBen 15y ago

I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln territory Competition is healthy for everyone and no company would expect to own an entire vertical (I'm sure Fog Creek doesn't). In this instance, this is actually a good thing for companies already using Kiln because there are high switching costs and so you wouldn't want to be on a platform that isn't being innovated and developed. A bit of healthy competition will ensure innovation continues and also prices stay competitive.

andymoe 15y ago
I agree that competition is healthy and what I'm saying is I'd like to see a volley back from Fog Creek into the lower end of the market that Github seems to control.

benatkin 15y ago

GitHub's not sad, and it's good they aren't. If you want to help your customers and your own business, it's best not to be too cozy with potential partners that may wind up being competitors. They've already been through this with LightHouse, and GitHub and their customers are better for it.

foobarbazetc 15y ago

"the Australians"? Who calls Atlassian that unless they work for FogCreek? WTF?

andymoe 15y ago
I did not want to bring them into the mix and it was the nicest thing I could think to say about them. Bitbucket and SourceTree (acquired) are quite usuable however I find JIRA and Confluence to be really kludgy ugly products but the same could be said for some of the stuff I produce so whatever.