Wow, this reads less like freemium and more that they're using enterprise customers to bludgeon innovation out of the market. This new pricing is a pretty big step function, $10 for 10 users, $1,200 for 11 users.

While I like JIRA and have recommended it to many clients, this move is not just to feed the future sales funnel, but attempt to raze competition. Makes me sad for the cool startups (i.e. not Atlassian or Fog Creek) in this area.

Out of curiosity, which startups?

I'm not sure this changes anyone's chances though -- bug tracking was already a bit crowded. They're probably going after the trac users.

Honest question: how are these products better than, for example redmine and MediaWiki, if using them for personal/small team purposes?

I (and a few others) posted a reply to this question in a similar thread from a few days ago. Here's the link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867439

I find Confluence a lot nicer than MediaWiki. It's much better organized (organizing pages in Confluence seems built in, MediaWiki's "category" feature seems like an afterthought). Confluence also has useful features for collaboration with things like status updates. I'd give the free trial a go, and compare to see which one works best for you.

I had the same exact thought, not in a disparaging way, but if there's better stuff available, it'd be nice to know about it.

We are using Confluence Wiki, Jira Issue Tracking, and Greenhopper for release planning and love it but I can attest even with only a few users Confluence requires more memory than a small 256meg slice can offer. We are on a 512meg slice with Chunkhost and are planning to upgrade to a 1gig slice due to performance issues.

Still, $10 each for 10 users is a great offer.

Except for Clover...the one I care about.

The counterpart is that they killed the personal licenses, but $10 for that kind of software is very cheap anyway.

About half a year ago they sold JIRA licenses for 5 users for $5, for some kind of charity.

Sadly, they require a host with J2EE, since it is written using JSP.

It doesn't matter if you have a company, but for a hobby project that kind of kills it.

Why ? Tomcat costs just as much as apache/php/python/perl costs.

You obviously haven't run JIRA and Confluence before. They take up a lot of memory and resources, certainly more than a low end VPS can handle.

Well yes, but I have been unable to find a host for tomcat the way you could find a host for, say php.

Quite understandable for the market they operate in, but a bit unfortunate for the hobby projects that might benefit from them.

A low-end Linode box is only $20/month and has plenty of capacity for Tomcat and company.

Alternatively, you Rackspace have a 256mb VM for $11/month, though you have to add bandwidth ontop of that.

slicehost:

http://www.slicehost.com/

$20 / month, full root access. Install tomcat and off you go.

That's cheaper than most bad habits ;)

a tomcat web app with database will choke and die on 256megs of ram

Depends on the number of users. If it is a hobbysite then I'm expecting that you have very little traffic (on the order of a few hundred uniques per day). If you go above that slap some google ads on it, reinvest what you make with those in your server and you'll be doing just fine. By the time you reach $80 / month (and that's only $2.75 / day) you can afford to lease a dedicated server, with as much ram as you care to buy, that's a one time expense.

And you'll still be out only what little bit there is between whatever you make and whatever it costs to get a dedicated server even if you decide to get one from day one.

Hobbies cost money.

edit: hey downmodders, how is your tomcat instance running ? Mine is doing ok:

21747 ? Sl 94:33 /usr/java/default/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/local/tomcat/conf/logging.properties -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/usr/local/tomcat/endorsed -classpath :/usr/local/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/usr/local/tomcat -Dcatalina.home=/usr/local/tomcat -Djava.io.tmpdir=/usr/local/tomcat/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start

J2EE can't possibly run well on the amount of RAM slicehost demands.