Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting (opens in new tab)

This is a good reason not to use assembla ever again. The same thing happened to me.

I used assembla when they had the free private accounts, since then I moved to Unfuddle. I don't like companies that do yo-yo on their policy.

According to Andy Singleton, CEO of Assembla.com, he said:

We did offer free private workspaces in 2006-2008. We didn't have a clear business model at the time. We started out with a goal to get to know programmers who worked on distributed teams. We supported this for three years, working nights and weekends. However, it turned out that the demand increased exponentially, and our costing and admin costs were out of control. So, we had to cancel some of the free services and ask our private users to pay a small subscription fee.

This time, we have been much more careful with the business model. Some of the things that are different are: * The package is different. In this free repo package, you do not get all tools. We have many opportunities to sell our premium tools to serious projects. And, we have more and better tools to sell. * We are using affiliate sponsors - essentially advertising. We are offering cloud hosting services to our users, and we make affiliate fees when we sell them. In the future, we will offer other cloud services that you can add to your "code in the cloud." * We have a profitable subscription business that pays for our admin and support team. We only have to make sure that we have a high quality service that attracts a few more of the customers that appreciate the complete service and pay for it.

Same story here. I liked Assembla but moved away, which was costly, and I'm not going to move back now.

I run Assembla, but I will say that Github is a good service, and they do a better job with code sharing and individual repositories. Assembla is more oriented toward managing teams. This is not a move to go against Github. We still offer Github as a repository tool. You can use Assembla ticketing / collaboration / team management tools, and link them to code commits on github.

This is the only way they will get users from GitHub.

As an Assembla user I fear they are not focusing on their core product. They have some weak areas in Assembla I wish they would focus on instead of reinventing the wheel.

The cost of github is so small that it's not really a factor.

Why the hippies? IMO, Github is a really useful tool.

Came here to say this, we also use repository hosting and love them. Can't beat the price.

Have also used Unfuddle when working with other shops. Its nice too, and has some Basecamp-esque features if you want something beyond trac.

Unfuddle's free accounts only allow 1 project and 2 users. Which is a bummer, because I really liked Unfuddle's interface, but I'm not gonna commit to a monthly service until we actually have revenue. :-(

The only case I generally need a GUI tool is for diff and merge. Meld handles it very well for me on Linux and git supports it by default.

for mac, i like gitx, but i wish it had built-in diffing.

We did offer free services for about 3 years. Then we had to reduce the free services because of rising hosting costs. No repositories were made public. We maintained private service for everyone for four months, and then restricted usage to read-only, for the people that didn't subscribe. So, no repositories were made public, people got three years plus another four months of free service, and the average charge for people that did subscribe was about $12 per month. If you can't afford that, you don't have a serious projects.

In this round, we have made substantial changes to the business model. Only the repository is free, so we can sell our premium ticketing, collaboration, and management tools. And, we have hosting affiliates that pay us for leads. Plus, the underlying service is profitable and supports the level of admin quality that is required.