Walking The Tightrope: Charging For Private Repo’s On Octobox.io
TLDR: If you currently use Octobox.io to manage notifications on private repositories then — from Monday — you will need to pay $10/month for each user or $100/month for each organisation to continue to do so.
Let’s start from the top: Andrew Nesbitt and I have been working together on Octobox.io for the past six months, full time. Octobox is the tool for developers working on GitHub who find notifications infuriating. If you don’t want to miss another mention, if you don’t want misplace another issue and, if you don’t want to manage your workflow though email: you need to try Octobox:
Octobox is a successful open source project: we have a small, but productive community of maintainers, contributors and users including organisations like Shopify who run company-wide instances for their own use. But Octobox.io is also a successful service in its own right: we host ~11k users who have together managed over 5m notifications across ~150k repositories.
But Octobox is not a sustainable project.
Our goal for Octobox is not only to solve the problems developers experience today, but to explore, document and solve the issues around creating a financially sustainable open source business. This means we have to balance the needs of users with the needs of the project’s maintainers. Andrew and myself have been fortunate enough to work on Octobox.io for the last six months while being paid by our previous employer under a ‘gardening leave’ agreement. This has enabled us to make a lot of progress on the project, to get it to where it is today. But that honeymoon is over and we must begin to consider the financial needs of the project earnestly.
Which is why, starting from Monday, you will no longer see notifications for private repositories on Octobox.io unless you pay to use it.
This change is based on one, key assumption: if you’re working on a private project we assume that project has some value to you, financial or otherwise. We know that users get a lot of value from Octobox, and we know how many users will be impacted by this change. We also know that this change will polarise some of those users. But we accept that for what it is and say to those who may be irked by it: Octobox is still an open source project, and you’re more than welcome to install your own instance. The cost of doing so on a service like Heroku will probably be equal to the cost of access to Octobox.io but you are free to make that choice. And for our corporate users: if you want to see more from Octobox then reach out to us on twitter, gitter or by email. We have some great ideas for you, and we’d love to hear what you think.
It’s a tightrope that we must walk but — with your support — we hope that together we can continue to move Octobox forward while creating a blueprint for others to make open source an independent career choice.
