Branching Out

I first went live with our beta three and a half months ago and I've been very pleased with the results so far.

Trunks was designed to be a simple, easy to use service focusing on your personal code, be it prototypes, weekend projects, or whatever you have. It was born out of a frustration with other services which either focus on a single source control tool, or sell based on the number of private repositories. Trunks recognize that often times, developers use multiple source control tools and want a similar experience from a hosted service. Additionally, developers by nature are tinkerers and have an ever growing collection of code. With the pricing structure of others, things can get quite expensive just because of the number of projects, not disk space or activity.

The beta has been a pretty smooth ride, with only a few issues. Over time, we've been improving our monitoring to ensure the service is well cared fore and looked after. So we are peeling the beta label off and making it official.

So what does this mean for me?

This means our paid plans will now be coming into effect. If you were in our beta and signed up before March 1st, then you will be given 60 days to continue to use the service for free. After the 60 days, you can either upgrade to a paid plan for 25% off our normal price for the first year. Our base plan is $24.95/year, or $18.71 for the first year for beta users.

If you sign up after March 1st, you will instantly get our 30 day free trial. This gives you all the features and all the space you want. At the end of your trial, we will recommend you a plan based on your usage.

With both, if you convert to a paid account before your time is up, you don't lose anything. We add the time on to your trial period, so if you sign up beforehand, you don't lose that free time at all.

How do you accept payment?

To sign up for a paid plan, just visit your profile page from the top header and you will see plan recommendations on the side. Choose to upgrade and you'll be taken to a payment page where you can either pay by credit card or by PayPal.

Payments are just one-time. Since our plans are yearly, we don't keep your credit card information. We'll just make sure to remind you in advance about your renewal.

PayPal seems to be a common request that often times isn't supported. Since we already treat payments as one time, didn't see a reason to not allow PayPal. No subscription logic to account for.

You don't have a free plan?

It may sound bizarre to not be doing the freemium model these days, but freemium didn't fit in with my goals for Trunks. Other services offer public repositories for free, but we don't support public repositories. Trunks is designed for private repositories. I also wanted Trunks to be cost effective, and with conversion ratios that are considered "good" by many, freemium didn't help maintain a lower cost. Free users tend to greatly out number paid users, but then your paid users are paying for all those free users. With a service that focuses on storage, there more realistic costs than just database rows.

Any new features with the launch?

With the launch, the main new feature is viewing diffs when viewing a commit. This was the final feature I'd wanted before coming out of beta. I've also made a number of interface tweaks and improvements and a number of backend improvements to help facilitate some future features.

What is coming?

I have a number of features in the works. First up is WebDAV support for Git and Mercurial. This will help solve a problem where SSH isn't well exposed, such as on Windows with TortoiseHg. I've also been building a couple prototypes for tagging projects. One of the goals with Trunks was management of a lot of repositories, one way to make that easier is with tagging and filtering to make navigating your dashboard easier.