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by andysingleton 5912 days ago
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.