I would buy this but - like the hours on an AOL Free Trial CD - I would never have the time to extract value from each of the offered services.
These services have confusing end times (3 month, 6 month, 12 month, transactional?) At a bare minimum I'd have to keep a calendar of what expires when and that's just an extra hassle. Next time, please work out a deal where ALL offered products end on the same date so there's less complexity buyers have to keep in mind.
Another concern: this bundle seems to have a mish-mash of offerings with little rhyme or reason. It's like someone said "let's throw as many vaguely web development related SaaS products together and hope there'll be something for everyone!".
Finally, why SaaS? Sure, it's a great business model for a company, but as a consumer each time I sign up for a SaaS I have to make a calculated risk:
* Does the service have a good data export option?
* How likely this service will be around for a year or longer if I'm to sink my time learning it?
* Does this company have any exposure and does it look like it knows what it's doing?
If you decide to stick with SaaS, I hope you curate better and streamline the deal, but frankly I'm looking forward to a Bundle of installed apps instead.
The deal is curated. All the mentioned apps were either from my personal experience using it or recommendation from HN.
Great guidelines on choosing SaaS (noted for future deal curation). And you are right about the end times. I'll keep an eye on that for the next bundle.
Thanks for the feedback! It's my first time doing this, and rest assured I'm listening with all ears.
Like lobo had mentioned, I would like to see a program-based bundle. If you were to able to follow the HumbleBundle's pricing scheme for programs like Sublime Text (and even f.lux which is free), coupled with other utility packages, I would be inclined to pitch in some cash.
By "curate" I meant to pick a theme or clear connection between the chosen apps. For example, you might offer an "analytics" bundle that offers numerous services that either tackle different aspects of site/usage analytics or allow the buyer to cheaply sample many "best of the best" services before making their decision.
This bundle lists an e-zine, a web-tv channel, SMS/VOIP API, CI, a dashboard, image hosting... The only thing linking these disparate services is the claim that "someone on HN recommended them" and that's it (was there a poll thread that you could link? citation appreciated). Taken together, this bundle makes for an incoherent product picture.
Another observation: the site claims that there are "limited units remaining", however the deal is running for 26 more days. Does this mean the bundle will be shut down when all digital licenses are "sold" or is this a way for getting more conversions? If the latter, you could step it up a notch and display fake dwindling license counters next to each product so users are placed under more pressure to make the purchase before you "run out of stock".
I'm so uncool! I have no idea what any of the included services are. From what I can gather, it's SaaS stuff. If it had included a free monthly neck beard shave, I might have purchased. I'm sure this package is useful to some of you out there, but honestly, I don't know one person that I consider a "hacker" that this would appeal to. Nice marketing use of the term "hacker" though.
Excuse me, I have to get back to yelling at the teenagers to get off my lawn.
I would imagine the "Hacker" bit is because this is affiliated with "HackerMonthly", a monthly print compilation of Hacker News. The actual services seem mostly aimed at early stage startup projects.
it says it's a "Print magazine of Hacker News", but then what does this mean "Digital subscription for 12 months*" Do they mail you an actual magazine, or do they email you a PDF/e-book of the articles?
FYI all of the things in the bundle are for new users only. I just tried to use the Twilio credit but they said trial accounts only. Refresh the page and notice that under every company it now says new users only. I was just hoping for a steep discount on many of the services I use. Teaches me to read the fine print I guess.
I would love to see this same thing but for box software tools, like sublime text and such. It worries me becoming dependent on external services like this.
Then it wouldn't be the same business model as this (conversion to paid customers for services bundled) and it would probably not work out really well.
Maybe you can make a setup of FOSS tools that hackers uses (OpenSSH, vim, tmux, Ubuntu, etc.) and make a big donation to them as a way to say "thank you".
Indeed, ubuntu seems to be going a bad direction IMO. The other issue is that I frequently have issues with Ubuntu. I try to submit bug reports, but the bug report submitter crashes.
I would do it manually, but hey... I'm busy... and I'm just trying ubuntu out to give it another chance. Of course going back to debian+xfce I never have any problems.
Earned my upvote because this is indeed a nice deal and probably tons of effort went into creating this kind of relationship with that many companies.
However, am I the only one who enjoys setting up Graphite and CI and similar software? (No email, though. Did it once, and don't want to give up sleeping time for a week to do it again.)
[disclaimer: I work at CircleCI, which is in the Bundle].
Good question! I think a lot of devs get therapeutic enjoyment from setting up CI. It starts out as fun for the first few hours, while everything is new and exciting. However, it turns to disdain very quickly when:
- you need to remember how to set up postgres/rvm/lucene again
- you need to add a 2nd server and realize you now need to manage a cluster (and you didn't automate the first one!)
- you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because the company CI server is down
- you realize the tests run too slowly and now need to figure out how to make them faster
- you get a bad performance review because of all the valuable engineer time you're wasting managing the CI server, which you could have outsourced for a fraction of the price
- you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products.
These are the sort of problems that hosted CI like https://circleci.com solve for you :)
> you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because company the CI server is down
This is a general problem with any kind of maintenance or setup that you might do. Did you write a diary of how you went about setting it up ? Did you communicate to the rest of your team how it's supposed to work / how you suspect it might break ?
If not, don't be _too_ surprised to be The One Person who gets called about that thing.
This is one of the reason we favour hosted services as much as possible. If the rest of the team has account on the service, you can likely solve your problems without relying on a single person.
> - you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products.
Being "the build guy" is an important role in delivering great products. In fact, SaaS CI offerings in my experience cater to a small subset of real world apps, none of which are usually heavily used non-trivial apps. I helped build one SaaS CI product and really hope this changes in the coming years as we abstract more 'things'. But for the time being, 'build guys' or DevOps guys or whatever the latest word is play a vital role.
The build guy is definitely a vital role. However, a common direction in the industry is to do DevOps instead of having "build guys". For CircleCI, we like to think that the "build guy"'s role will move to writing cool project-specific tools on top of CircleCI, instead of the low-level work of actually maintaining the servers.
That's why sysadmins should be encouraged to never configure systems directly, but use write-apply-observe-refine cycle of Puppet/Chef (or alike) declarative configurations.
Sounds like a hassle (and sometimes it is, especially in cases where to-be-configured software has Turing-complete configuration files), but in my own experience actually proved very helpful.
For some reason I keep getting targeted by your ads. I guess I must have searched too much Jenkins related stuff recently. Unfortunately I don't think our tiny startup can justify a monthly expense for CI at the moment. Great ads by the way!
But that assumes that the tiny startup is either confident that, only 3 short months from now, they'll be able to spring for the full price of hosted CI, OR they can afford the time investment to set up their whole build process in hosted CI... and then spend the time to migrate away from it into a local setup before the 3 months is up.
There's quite a bit more than the money involved when setting up SaaS infrastructure; even if the first 3 months were _sponsored_, the precious time invested would be wasted if they aren't signing up for the long haul.
And if they are signing up for the long haul, then 3 months of X discount makes very little difference in the calculation.
CircleCI costs $19 a month for a small startup (I know it says $49 value, but really small startups will be fine on a smaller plan). That's a lot cheaper than buying a server, just in raw costs, not even taking account developer time to set this up (much cheaper than setting it up locally on Jenkins).
If your tiny startup isn't able to afford a couple of hundred dollars a month for various hosted services after 3 months, then you're prioritizing wrong. You need to focus on building a valuable product and getting it to customers, not on building your own internal setup to save a little bit of money. Companies doing the former are much more likely to succeed than those doing the latter.
It's not my startup under discussion, actually (I wasn't the first commenter above), but to be fair the first choice for a tiny startup might well be "stick with the shell scripts and dead-simple architecture for now" rather than any CI at all, hosted or not.
Thanks for putting up the more relevant comparison price point, though, and I do agree with you that outsourcing non-core functions is essential to getting real work done on the actual product.
The only one that looks useful to me is the Geckoboard @ 50% lifetime off. But I'm confused, it also says, "50% lifetime discount off any plans* (usually $294)". Which of their plans is usually $294 (http://www.geckoboard.com/plans-and-pricing/)? And is it lifetime for the initially selected plan, or can I maintain the 50% off when I upgrade?
I kinda forgot how I came up with the figure $294. I remembered (vaguely) it was taking one of the plan with the assumption that customer would stay for 3 years or so.
I think the 50% discount applies even when you upgrade. Let me shoot an email to Geckoboard to confirm this.
The discount applies even when you upgrade - it's a pretty generous offer and could save you substantially more than $294 depending on the plan you choose.
This is awesome and inspirational. My sincere respect to Lim Cheng Soon. Doing this with 12 companies must have been tough.
VERY tough considering he lives in Malaysia. Lesson for those outside of the US and complaining about it. It really doesn't matter where you live as long as you are hustling. Lim Cheng Soon, take my bow!
Actually it's not tough. You could get a lot done using email ALONE. And, living in Malaysia gives me unlimited runway to keep shipping and experimenting. :)
This is pretty awesome. For someone that's starting out it offers basic things like version control hosting for cheaper than it already is. Also the fact that it comes with Growth Hacker is pretty cool too, along with a 90 day money back, you honestly can't go wrong here. Big thanks to HM for this.
Most of the bundled offers provide savings for a limited time. After purchasing, does one have control over when each of the services start or do they all start immediately?
It isn't secure, even if it is in an iframe, as the href of the iframe could easily be changed with a man in the middle attack.
You should force https for the whole site.
Exactly right -- please do redirect to https at a minimum for any payment pages.
The actual risk of a MitM attack is low, but it's certainly feasible; your page would look exactly the same if it were tweaked en-route to use a completely different source for the overlay iframe, and tweaking your page en-route is possible because you're sending it unencrypted.
There's also a web-standards rationale -- all payment pages should be over SSL, because it's one of the few security precautions that non-technical users can reliably verify. Any unencrypted-but-legit payment pages undermine the lesson that payment pages should be SSL-only, when we should be encouraging it.
There are valid reasons why a site might find switching to full SSL harder than just fixing payment pages. Use your imagination.
What if they rely on free CloudFlare support for site content? Going full SSL will mean another $20/month of hosting cost.
What if the site in question comprises a thousand HTML pages written on MS Frontpage over 15 years, and most of those pages (if flipped to https) will start showing "insecure content" warnings until they're edited?
By all means, doing more than the minimum will be trivial for some sites, and a good idea for them, but that's not true for everyone.
And this site in question? Yea, thats what I thought. There are exceptions to every rule but this is certainly not one of them.
And really, those aren't exceptions I would call worthy.
CDN / cheap ass issues: you're selling something and running a business, businesses have costs, 20/month aint nothin to secure you're shit.
15 years worth of legacy frontpage you call content: the "insecure content" warnings are probably right regardless of ssl. Further to the point, nobody cares about 15 years worth of shit nobody reads, move it to a different subdomain if its static junk that can't be secured, or I don't know delete it? We'd all be better off without it clogging up the interwebs anyway.
SSL Isn't new, its been around almost two decades, you're making bad excuses for bad people. Stop it. Site wide HTTPS is a good idea for everyone and it is trivial, if its not (in your case), that is your fault and your problem - not mine, and certainly not your users.
I had moved on to talking about sites in general; the site in question would be just fine with site-wide SSL.
For the rest of it -- at some point you're going to have to get used to the idea that the people putting content on the web are a lot more diverse than you'd prefer, and their motivations are also a lot more diverse than you might imagine or think "worthy".
If you want to tell them all "do it right or go die in a fire" that's your prerogative, but it's not the most effective approach.
No matter what browser I am in, I can't purchase this. It just says it can't verify my card information. Chrome and Safari on Mac. I checked the card 3 times and just used it a few minutes ago.
Edit: Lim instantly reached out to rectify the issue. Turns out my bank (Chase) flagged it for fraud. Cleared it with them and now I own the hacker bundle :)
This is great! Are you thinking of making the list of offers available via RSS or an API? We would love to link to them from our web app directory at https://starthq.com
Nice. This is what AppSumo used to be. They used to offer package deals on SaaS products. Unfortunately they haven't done so in a long time. Glad to see someone else is stepping up.
I only get about half the offers above the fold and some obviously look more interesting than others. I'm wondering if it would be valuable to know which offers are correlated with higher purchase rates?
Presentation of offerings from multiple partner companies is often randomized to prevent bickering between said partner companies over their positioning.
I'm not affiliated with Humble Bundle, but most of the offerings I've seen from them fit on a single line in the default presentation. I would be less upset about being second-from-the-right than I would be about being below the fold.
These services have confusing end times (3 month, 6 month, 12 month, transactional?) At a bare minimum I'd have to keep a calendar of what expires when and that's just an extra hassle. Next time, please work out a deal where ALL offered products end on the same date so there's less complexity buyers have to keep in mind.
Another concern: this bundle seems to have a mish-mash of offerings with little rhyme or reason. It's like someone said "let's throw as many vaguely web development related SaaS products together and hope there'll be something for everyone!".
Finally, why SaaS? Sure, it's a great business model for a company, but as a consumer each time I sign up for a SaaS I have to make a calculated risk:
* Does the service have a good data export option?
* How likely this service will be around for a year or longer if I'm to sink my time learning it?
* Does this company have any exposure and does it look like it knows what it's doing?
If you decide to stick with SaaS, I hope you curate better and streamline the deal, but frankly I'm looking forward to a Bundle of installed apps instead.